In a rare interview, Udi Manber offers an informed view of the current trends in web search. Google’s vice president in charge of search quality comes with a pretty impressive background as far as the internet is concerned. He joined Google in 2006 but before that, he was a computer science professor at the University of Arizona and chief scientist at Amazon and Yahoo. He has been working on web search for more than fifteen years. If there’s anyone who knows the technology and has witnessed its developments, it would have to be Manber.

Search engines caught up with the improvements of the Internet. Even in the nineties, it was not enough that information was stored, it was essential that the data can be easily located. So the key driver for any search engine was not to store a large amount of information but to be able to find whatever one is looking for easily.

Curiously, this is something that is taken for granted even in today’s generation. It seems but normal, logical even, to have search engines behave that way.

Everyone expects to find what they are looking for on the internet. It has to be there, as Manber notes. If you can’t find it, there is the assumption of something going wrong. Every few years or so, the search engine goes through several different developments. “What we do now, we couldn’t have foreseen 10 years ago… People expect more from us,” says Manber.

Hence, the constant developments in web search. Algorithm adjustments come up so frequently that Google has made more than 450 of those in the past year. This is a good way to explain why it can be a good idea to wait it out a few days for your site’s search engine placement to improve than to make immediate changes in the though that you may have done something that needs to be fixed.

Manber also advices that it’s not right to assume that Google is personally manipulating the search results and that’s why your placement keeps on bouncing or deteriorating even. “At Google, we do not manually change results… we do not have the capability… We made that decision not to put that capability in the algorithm,” he points out.