Peirong: Live Search Profile

Search Development Engineer

Why is your role personally meaningful?

I joined the team in July 2003. No one had yet been assigned the ranker, the part that orders the results, so I got it and, later, the query language, also. The ranker especially was a critical piece: Serve up results as fast as you like, but if they're not any good, no one's going to care. Not only was it a great job, it was one that doesn't come along very often! There aren't that many new search engines that really have a chance to be #1 and each one only needs one ranker and one query language. There could have been any number of other really smart people who could done it, maybe even better, but they weren't here and I was. So for about 18 months while we built the first release, I walked around feeling like the luckiest person on the planet that I was getting to help build a whole search engine from scratch and that I got to do these wonderful exciting pieces. I'm doing Spam these days (getting it out, not putting it in) but I still feel lucky. Search is a wonderful problem area.

What have been your favorite moments on the search team?

When I first joined Search, I really had no idea how to do ranking. All I really knew was that it had to be fast and it had to work. Whenever our general manager was asked how we'd win in search, he'd always say we'd do it with better relevance, which is mostly a measure of ranking. We'd just have to invent whatever it took. Meanwhile, our architect had me scared stiff that since my ranker would run against every matching page, I would single-handedly blow us out of the water on perf. In September 2003, I finally brought up the very first ranker. It had a small number of features like exact phrase in the title it was able to consider. I had tuned it by hand with a couple dozen queries against a toy index of about 64K documents and it seemed to work, though of course, on that small an index, it was hard to tell. It was about another week before we got it onto our test-bed system of perhaps 1M documents (in those days, everything was by hand). So you want to know my favorite moment? It was when one our dev leads came by to say he'd finished deploying that early ranker and tried it and he nodded and smiled and said, "Looks =really= good." By the way, it was. :) I was ecstatic. That was the moment I knew it was going to work.

Is the search team a good place for women? Why?

A question like that seems to beg for me to tell you about how many women we already have in Search and what a supportive environment it is for women. This is a work in progress. Right now, we have a growing percentage of women in testing and program management, and we are working hard to find great women for our development team. So I suppose the best reason I can give for why women should come is simply the one big reason I'm here, which is that I can't imagine doing anything else that could matter more. I don't think the things that attract me or most other women I know are all that gender-specific. Here are some things that are important to me, but it doesn't seem like a list that's very different than many of the guys might write down. 1) I want to create something personally meaningful, 2) I want a hard problem that I get to own, 3) I want to be part of an exciting team doing something new. If you're a really good computer scientist and these are things that matter to you, the place to be right now is Search. You can't go take a class somewhere or read a book to tell you how to build a search engine. It's this wild new technology that's changing the world and you have to invent everything. It makes my spirit soar.