I'll make an attempt at live reporting via the weblog.
The session is a panel with Google talking about organizing the web.
Google's Mission:
Organize the world's information to make it universally accessible and useful.
Nice, broad, and ambitious. Gotta like that.
After describing in detail how Google manages indexes, he says, "Managing all that is a little on the tricky side." Understatement of the day.
Page Rank: A query independent measure of value for each page.
Linking to many pages lessens the 'value' of page rank that yor page has. The fewer links you have, the more emphasis on your links.
Designed on the concept that everyday machines are going to die. For scalability and reliability, they have 10s of thousands of machine constantly working. Considering consumer grade MTBF, they get plenty of failures and actually buy substandard RAM to save money.
Demo of https://labs.google.com and https://www.google.com/zeitgeist
Content-Targeted Advertising -Using the search words to choose appropriate advertisement to display that may be much more effective.
Google News - Auto-generated news from 4,500 news sources arranged in an unbiased, objective way.
Froogle - Aggregates products via page rank and relevance. Google makes no money from the products themselves, but they do advertise on the page.
Intro of Evan Williams of Pyra/Blogger/Google - "Blogger is now a Google product."
Lots of speculation and theories as to why the purchase happened. What is the secret plan of 'world domination'? No secret plan...
Plan:
Blogger and Google Join
Blogger services remain unchanged
Building a better Blogger
Help people find blog content
Commitment to unbiased, objectve search results
"Google is one of the few web giants that values personal opinion."
What is desperately needed is enhanced ability to search blog content. Increasingly difficult to find intersting content. Google's expertise in searching is the key to help find the intersting content.
Reading the assumptions would make you think there are now hundreds of people working on 'Bloogle'. Not true. Same people, but the food's much better. A couple new guys. Still constrained by people inside Google. 'Never enough people, all the hardware they could imagine.'
After stablization of Blogger within Google, they can work on new ideas.
There is no interest to bias Google searches in favor of Blogger. They want to help the blogger community in general. They want to work with Radio, Movable Type, and other tools.
I just asked Evan, 'How much did you get?' He didn't answer and said 'Did I mention how good the food is?' I didn't expect that I'd get a number, but someone had to ask...
Metatags are problematic, since the page is telling the viewer one thing, and tells Google somethign else. For this reasons, Google doesn't use meta-tags.
Google Answers - This is not a highly public site for Google, but the usage and popularity is rising.
Google Toolbar - Future directions (asked by Anil Dash) - They may get around to a Mozilla client since Google people all use linux.
Wireless oppurtunity - They have WAP and low bandwidth services, but they are not utilized much. Pages are proxied to reduce non-mobile content.
Google has systems for local country results to allow graphics to be displayed correctly. Blogger would like to take advantage of the global reach to provide a higher service level.
Natural Language Search - Yes, they are thinking about it. They aren't clear that keyword searches alone won't suffice. Once voice interaction with computers is more common, they see the rise of natural language searches.
Semantic Web - Any plans? 'Nice idea, but not now.' They do it partially with Froogle, not in a concerted effort.
End of session. Whew.