Abstract: I recently attended a number of tutorials and keynote talks that taught me much about how commercial search engines innovate and improve. The key lies in creating evaluation infrastructures that allow search and interface changes to be tested quickly and accurately. In this talk I will give an overview of what I learned, highlight key points, and show that the methods employed by Google and Bing has a wide range of applications in many software systems.

Bio: Mark Sanderson is a Professor at the School of Computer Science and Information Technology at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. As the head of the RMIT Information Retrieval group, he is particularly interested in the evaluation of search engines, summarisation, geographic search and logs analysis. Prof. Sanderson is an associate editor of ACM Transactions on the Web and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. He is also a co-editor of Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval.