Search quality discussion at Google
This is a video which provides a glimpse into the complexity of Google inner workings. A search quality group meets to discuss a proposed change. Google has well over 10,000 engineers, and more than 1,000 person-years have gone into the search algorithm development. You may wonder why only 1k years when there are 10k engineers and Google was founded more than 10 years ago – shouldn’t it be 100,000 person-years, or at least a linear average as the initial number of engineers was 2? Well, search is not the only thing they do.
What is really cool here is that Google has a whole team dedicated to figuring out, implementing, and testing the change that will affect only 0.1% of queries. Even these ‘tiny’ changes with ‘minor impact’ get attention of employees of all levels – from young engineers to VPs.
You can read more about it at official Google blog.