I heard Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience, speak at Google Unbound last week and never got around to posting my notes about her talk- and another interview with Marissa was published at SearchEngineLand. 

First I'll post my notes (not to much to write actually) and then I'll provide my feedback of the SearchEngineLand interview.

My notes of Marissa Mayer at Google Unbound: 1/18/07

"….Why Google books?
Google has a 61% market share in Searches the company brakes Search down to  4 components: Comprehensiveness, Relevance, User experience (faster means better and often used) and Latency.

At Google, we initially ignore cpu power, storage, bandwidth and monetization.  Instead, we focus on The user and Solving problems. We break down the market for book searches to Users, advertisers, content.

What drives sales of books?  Searches about Current events (ie: election of new pope). Looking at metrics,  up to 25% of books that are sold are due to Internet Searches.

That's it (Marissa Mayer spoke for about 10 minutes); I am enjoying the free Laptop Tote Bag they gave to everyone who attended - it costs about 100 bucks to buy an equivalent laptop bag on timbuk2.com - and there was over 1000 people who attended….meaning Google spent over 100,000 dollars in providing laptop bags for everyone (thanks Google!).

Of course, the bags that were given out at Google Unbound had "Google Unbound" stitched on them (making them collectors items, more like a limited edition).

Anyway, now to Marissa Mayer's interview with SearchEngineLand:

"…..For us, given that we think our ads in some cases are as good an answer as our search results and we want them to be integral to the user experience, we don't want that kind of segmentation and pausing. We tried not to design it so it looked like a side bar, even though we have two distinct columns. You know, There are a lot of philosophies like that that go into the results page and of course, testing both of those formats to see if that matches our hypothesis."

"….We hold them to a very high click through rate expectation and if they don't meet that click through rate, the OneBox gets turned off on that particular query.  We have an automated system that looks at click through rates per OneBox presentation per query. So it might be that news is performing really well on Bush today but it's not performing very well on another term, it ultimately gets turned off due to lack of click through rates. We are authorizing it in a way that's scalable and does a pretty good job enforcing relevance. We do have a few niggles in the system where we have an ongoing debate and one of them is around news versus product search

One school of thought is what you're saying, which is that it should be the case that if I'm typing digital cameras, I'm much more likely to want to have product results returned. But here's another example. We are very sensitive to the fact that if you type in children's flannel pajamas and there's a recall due to lack of flame retardation on flannel pajamas, as a parent you're going to want to know that. And so it's a very hard decision to make.

You might say, well, the difference there is that it's a specific model. Is it a Nikon D970 or is it digital cameras, which is just a category? So it's very hard on the query end to disambiguate. You might say if there's a model number then it's very specific and if only the model number matches in the news return the news and if not, return the products. "

A couple of things - with this statement, Marissa is confirming Google has the ability, and does monitor click-through rates on Search Results; it had been speculated quite a bit that they did this for some time.  Also, Google is trying to figure out the type of query a searcher enters into the search engine in order to serve up the best result.  That's significant because, based on your site content - your site might not be organized to come up for the kind of queries you want - and therefore, your rankings won't be what you want them to be.

"…I think the most pressing, immediate need as far as the search interface is to break paradigm of the expectation of "You give us a keyword, and we give you 10 URLs". I think we need to get into richer, more diverse ways you're able to express their query, be it though natural language, or voice, or even contextually. I'm always intrigued by what the Google desktop sidebar is doing, by looking at your context, or what Gmail does, where by looking at your context, it actually produces relevant webpages, ads and things like that."

To me, the days of the 10 ten search results are numbered (if they're not already dead).  Within the next two - three years - most search results will be personalized and the importance of ranking well in generalized results will be minimalized by the need to rank well in certain types of personalized results.  It's not yet clear how that's going to be done - my guess is optimization will be based on segmentation of the audience - much as Web Analytics is based on Audience Segmentation.