We've a clear mission to help organize world's information: Google News creator

Search giant Google has opened shop in Bangalore with major expansion plans.
It recently held Google India Code Jam 2005, a big talent search for programmers
across South Asia. Bangalore's center head Krishna Bharat is also the creator
of the revolutionary Google News. Here he talks to Sunil Rajguru about the
Bangalore R&D center, Google's mission, mobile search plans and how search
engines work.

What is happening in Bangalore?
Bangalore is an R&D center. It's a peer center to our other offices in
California, Seattle, New York, Santa Monica, and Internationally, Zurich and
Tokyo. Our vision is that we are going to be a global campus with many offices.
Every office is going to offer the same opportunities-which means that we will
hire people in India at the same time as in Tokyo or anywhere else. They will
work on projects that are relevant locally as well as globally. We spent some
fraction of our time on the same kinds of projects that our Google marketing
does. Roll up the same product, service or make some fundamental changes in the
infrastructure that everyone will benefit from directly. So this includes
figuring out how Google's mission can be most effective in India.

By the way we are not just here for India but South of Asia. We feel our
scope is just not in India but the entire neighborhood. It's like Zurich is
responsible for all of Europe. So we want to understand the problems people face
in information: it might be performance, availability of content-like, say,
why is this content missing or it's much better developed in Europe or such
thing. So we need to understand the issues in India and South Asia, and make
appropriate adjustments to products or develop new products. The main challenge
lies in the languages and encoding them.

Is Google getting into mobile search?
We are very interested in mobiles because it certainly makes sense in
developing countries. There is a lot more of mobile usage here in India than in
the US. At the same time the bandwidth and the screen is much smaller and, also,
you don't have the luxury of a keyboard. But not all applications make sense
on a desktop. Finding information does make a lot of sense, especially in the
sense of location. Like a person may say: Give me information based on where I
am. I think part of our charter is to understand this. In India, the penetration
of broadband is not as far as in Europe. Even the availability of network
accessing again will influence the way that people access Google.

What about Ad Sense?
Google does a very good job of ad-based monetization. In 'Ad Sense' you can
embed ads that are monetizing the content for you. So we can figure out which
ads are most relevant, given the contents, especially for something this
technical. When you key in "How to do 'Wi-Fi' on the notebook" you'll
get lots and lots of products there to be sold related to Wi-Fi. So ads are very
relevant.

There are a lot of companies which believe in Google optimization. How
does that work?
Google optimization is a good thing because in a market where there are lots of
inexperienced websites, it's important to have someone come in and say useful
things: it has an educational aspect to it. But sometimes they go a little
beyond that. They pretend to be a flower site while selling tea. That's not
good. It makes users waste their time. This is called spam. Search engine
optimizers sometimes bring in spam to an otherwise spam free area. Search
engines don't like spam because they feel it's an inconvenience for our
users. The way by which Google fights spam is by looking for organic growth from
the web. It's a natural number of times a search engine/search site will put
up its name. We have invested a fair amount of effort in research. We have a
large team working on it.

It looks as if you're into practically everything...web search, question
search, video search, archives. Where does it all end?
We have a very clear mission-to help organize the world's information
and make it accessible. So, information is the only thing that you may need to
know to make decisions. Our role is very clear, we are not trying to hold the
information, we are trying to mediate. So we want to be friends with both
consumers and producers and we want to save time for the consumers. Like if you're
trying to make a decision and you need information, Google helps in finding that
information quickly. Information may come in many forms but the way it is
accessed and served up has many things in common.

Is there a limit to how much you can store?
No. The limit is only based on the availability of the events. Google has
very large spaces around the world to maintain data. As the requirements come
up, we increase the space. We constantly make the process more efficient, make
all the failures more manageable, optimize storage and availability of content.

How do search engines search?
We have trained computers to look for information or content given a large
amount of data. Historically, web search came out of library science. Library
science is a small collection of documents in a library that helps in finding
information. But that had limited options and the quality wasn't that good.
This then migrated to the web, with the same parameters. But the web has lots
and lots of content with very highly variable quality. But people wanted only
say the top ten results. So the stakes are much higher.

We have to understand from a number of signals, which are indicators of
quality and relevance. Google has a fine track record of finding these signals
for research and integrating them. Our ability is to find the content of the web
and make it available very quickly using specialized infrastructure. There are
hundreds of searches happening simultaneously. For all searches we need to run
through the index rapidly and find all potential cases. So we have to go beyond
the superficial signal and move into the linkage and what is the text saying.
The other consideration is the language.

People say Google's beta versions drag on and on. Comments?
That's just a way of Google saying there are men at work. There are people
inside the team and the team is still thinking of ways to make it better. So
Google spends a lot of time improving the products it has. We keep rolling out
new updates too.