Ramez: Live Search Profile

Search Group Program Manager

What's your book about? What motivated you to write it?

My book (More Than Human) is about how the science fiction of human enhancement - smart pills, super longevity, bionics - is turning into reality. It's mostly science journalism, looking at the research happening in labs around the world that has the potential to give men and women these kinds of augmentations. I wrote it mostly to let people know about the incredible things happening in science. I got the idea in 1999, when I read a research paper about how a group at Duke had given a mouse the power to move a robot arm just by thinking about it. I thought "wow, that sounds like science fiction!" and realized that most people would have no idea this sort of thing was actually happening.

Do you see any similarities between search technology and genetics?

I see search as a way to make people smarter. We give people the power to find, consume, and share knowledge in a way that was impossible just a few years ago. That's a powerful extension of the human mind, and in a sense raises the collective intelligence of the whole planet. To me, that's very similar in spirit to the genetic and cybernetic enhancements I talk about in my book. They're all just ways to expand human ability and especially the human mind.

What's your latest creative endeavor?

Live Search! The problems we work on here are incredibly challenging and fun. It takes a lot of creativity to solve problems like how you run thousands of servers with just a handful of people, how you search billions of pages in just milliseconds, how you get the right results to the top of the page, and how you detect search engine spammers who are trying to game the system. This is an incredibly stimulating place to work. It gets my creative juices flowing. Maybe some day I'll write a second book, but for now my creativity is focused on work.

How many nights a week do you go home at a reasonable hour?

Hah. Depends on what you think "reasonable" is. I have the goal of leaving the office at 6pm every night. I hardly ever make 6 exactly, but I'm usually close. Then there are those occasional long nights - sometimes because we have a deadline coming up, but more often because there's something I'm so excited about that I can't tear myself away from it. There are some people on the team who really do an awesome job pulling themselves away from work at a given hour - general manager or our architect, for example. I really respect that and I'm trying to learn. But sometimes I'm just too much of a geek to stop playing with the amazing technology we have here.