Truth to say, I thoroughly enjoyed Prabhakar Raghavan's talk at the Leela. The talk started off with some facts about what and how users search on the web; delved into the complexities of understanding and deducing the users' needs; and few details on how the monetisation engine has proceeded over the years. The insights offered were quite delightful. The videos of the talk are available on the BigThinkers events page.

And, oh yeah! The video of the QA session is also available. :-)

This year's Yahoo's Bigthinkers India Series kicks off today. The talk is on hard science problems at the core of web search, by Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Labs. The event is going to be held at the Leela Palace.

An abstract -

Web search is undergoing an evolution from high-precision document retrieval for keyword queries, to fulfilling the task implicit in a user's search. We review examples of this in major search engines, then survey the underlying hard science problems both in computer science and in the social sciences.

More info on the event can be found here. I attended Andrei Broder's talk on Computational Advertising last year; and I sincerely hope this time round it turns out to be better than that. I mean, the talk was good and enriching. But it was the hour-long Q&A session that actually killed me. Some of the questions were so unwarranted that Andrei must have wanted to catch a flight back to Silicon Valley right that moment. Am keeping my fingers crossed this time.

If any of you are attending too, then give me a hoot. We will catch up at the coffee bar while the juveniles fire their questions!