Engineering Director / Principal Engineer
Mountain View, Ca, Us
I was thrilled and humbled to have a front-row seat in the story of Google Search since its early days, and to help shape and protect its user-focused, experimental, inclusive culture. I directed Universal Search for a decade starting in 2006, enabling different result types to be retrieved efficiently, ranked properly, and displayed coherently. This transformed the look and feel and usefulness of web search and my team and I were honored to receive the founders' prestigious EMG Award. Along the way I led search teams for Images, Local and Video, and advised teams for News and Shopping. I also got the free on-the-job legal education I never asked for!In 2010 I made a choice to narrow the focus of that Video team onto YouTube search due to its huge potential, and led it for 5 years. I drove a new architecture that boosted global watchtime by 8.5%, YT's largest single jump in a decade, as the effects of better search rippled across recommendations and personalization -- and threatened to break the internet (seriously!).In 2014-2015 I built a 50-person team from scratch to prototype an ML predictive Android Assistant under the direct guidance of Larry Page. Nice demo, and, um, "a good learning experience”.Starting in 2016 I initiated "Explore", convincing execs to expand Search's focus beyond immediate answers and into longer learning journeys. I assembled and led a 100+ person program that launched new session-oriented data models connecting the dots between topics, highlighted more visual content, and made Google much more interactive -- on our result page then extending into the browsing process in our mobile apps. We managed to shift the whole org's focus toward journeys including new longitudinal metrics. In 2021 I got involved with a team applying Large Language Models (LLMs) in Search. I think they'll change Search a lot, but alas my time was up. (And yes, beginning til end, I felt like a Noogler who didn't know anything yet.)
