Comments on: A Frank Interview with Gary Flake

By: Grigori

Grigori — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:41:12 +0000

I think they can make that work, I think we'll see a lot more interesting things come out of Redmond.

By: www.betterrankings.com

www.betterrankings.com — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:40:50 +0000

I think they can make that work, I think we'll see a lot more interesting things come out of Redmond.

By: Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 01:29:17 +0000

I’m amused that he thinks their web search UI is in a much better place, because I find the search results UI at live.com to be one of the worst I’ve experienced.

By: Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 01:28:26 +0000

I’m amused that he thinks their web search UI is in a much better place, because I find the search results UI at live.com to be one of the worst I’ve experienced.

By: dumbfounder

dumbfounder — Thu, 04 May 2006 14:49:53 +0000

The only two things that 64 bit machines give you that 32 bit don’t is extra ram and you no longer have to synchronize on longs or doubles. The synchronization is rarely a factor, so basically it’s all about RAM. There are a ton of algorithms that require random access to vast amounts of data, and it is about 1000 times faster to access random data in RAM versus on disk. The purpose of an inverted file system is to make it so random access to data is unnecessary, but it means you need to be very efficient with what data you are working with. If you had an algorithm that determined a matched document, and then actually looked up some meta data for the document (like the date it was created, it’s title, really anything), and it required a disk lookup each time then searching would take a very long time. For instance, if you had a single server that produced 10,000 matches on a single search, and you needed to do random disk lookups each time (which take roughly 10ms) it would take a min of 100 seconds to do the search. Obviously that sucks. If you load all of that metadata into ram, those random accesses to data offer little overhead on the search, maybe a few millis total. These are rough numbers, but should give you the idea. What I don’t understand is why they are all psyched about it now. 64 bit has been around for a while. We at Dumbfind have been using 64 bit machines for 2 1/2 years now.

By: Keith Cash

Keith Cash — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 16:15:35 +0000

I see Gary is hyped on the 64 bit thing. This is just promotion. I think over the next 6 months we take the wait and see approach.

By: Ian

Ian — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 10:51:41 +0000

"there is an even richer class of algorithms that can only be efficiently built on a 64 bit system"

Can he give us some examples? Perhaps point us towards some Msn research papers?

By: Capt.Obvious

Capt.Obvious — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 22:10:32 +0000

I don’t know how Gary can claim that Microsoft is the first to support 64-bit, when Linux has had 64-bit support for years (and Solaris for nearly a decade). Maybe Gary would like to ask the HotMail team how simple it was to port everything to Windows…

In the end, none of it matters: all that matters is the relevance of the search results. And in this core metric, MSN is far, far behind Google or Yahoo.

By: You don't say

You don't say — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 21:47:26 +0000

64 bit eh??? Pretty revolutionary.

Bet google never thought of that.

By: Dion Hinchcliffe

Dion Hinchcliffe — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 15:55:27 +0000

I remember watching Gary Flake give a lively and fascinating talk this year at Microsoft Search Champs on the very morning of the announcement of Live Labs. I happened to make a podcast of the talk that morning (the first ever about Live Labs and its vision). Afterwards, when asked Gary if I could post it to the world, he thought maybe 2-3 seconds and said "Go for it!". I was pleasantly surprised at the openness and rapid thinking/action that it represented.

Anyway, Gary definitely seems to get what's happening out here on the Web and in the world. It'll be interesting to see if a small system like Live Labs can truly change such a large system as Microsoft, without becoming one with the mothership in the process. Their incubator approach will be the one to watch I think. If they can make that work, I think we'll see a lot more interesting things come out of Redmond.

Dion