[mario]

Vinton Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist was visiting University of Waterloo today, so I had an opportunity to attend his talk, and even more importantly, graduate student meeting with Cerf, in which questions were asked and answered in front of much smaller audience.

Of course, I did not hassle him with Gixen's ranking problem (I'd prefer to meet Matt Cutts for this), but his answers gave me some insight in which direction Google search is moving.

In no moment was it apparent that he sees any problem in the pagerank system, nor in secrecy of google's ranking algorithm. So pagerank as core of Google search obviously stays for now. He mentioned two ways google search could be improved in the future:

- semantic analysis (in addition to syntax analysis & pagerank only, as is case now), and
- user intent analysis, by keeping track of specific user's queries.

Other interesting details he mentioned during his presentation:

Youtube now consumes 20% of all the HTTP traffic on the internet, and 10% of all the internet traffic overall. I found this to be an impressive piece of information, that one company, or now it's rather a piece of one company, consumes 10% of internet's resources.

He also said that Google may release some time this year some publicly available search engine code (a stripped down version of google search?).