Russell: Live Search Profile

Search Relevance Test Lead

What's so great about working on search?

Finally my mother understands the answer when she asks: "what do you work on?" It's not all great though - with her understanding of "what I work on" has come emails (quickly followed by the telephone call asking if I got the email she just sent) asking me why she can't find what she's looking for. It is wonderful to be so close to our customer experience. It's awesome to be able to look into "why" we give the results we do. It isn't so great that my mother has my work email address and still doesn't trust that email will be delivered.

What made you come to this team?

Honestly or not honestly? It was the window office - pure and simple :-). Honestly, it was the chance to work on a project that allowed me to explore the internet, work on projects like "filtering out spam", the very smart people I would be working with, being able to see clearly who the competition was and my personal ability to track our progress toward our goals.

Why does Microsoft need to win in this area?

Have you used the current Search offering? I mean, seriously? Relevance is subjective; when Google came along it took a while for me to get used to them and feel like they had good results. If I take a step back and look at how I work with Google I realize it isn't as easy for me to find things -- I've been trained. The constant rephrasing, adding quotes, removing quotes... We have to win because we have to offer an alternative that gets people the right results at the right time. We have a tremendous potential to use what we know about customer service to really personalize and improve upon the search experience.

What does success look like?

Success is really getting the right results on the first attempt. Search results mean something to me: news is news that's important to me, a restaurant search finds ones close to me, images are relevant to me so that when I look for pictures of "uncle Fred" they know I was looking for "brown bread" (I'm from England). Oh and...my mother stops emailing me links to sites that have nothing to do with her queries.