1) Agree : "users don’t really want to narrow their search, they want an instant
answer"
2) Disagree : "how people can get to the top relatively quickly. " – Why – Page ranking and click fraud methods.
3) Disgree: "great deal of their time battling spammy link farms" – Need to spend more time and have seccess to. I gave up Blogspot- becasue of the spam that was hitting my site..
4) Disagree:"Nobody ever writes about how we constantly improve our ranking system" – Waht ranking sytems ?? Refer points (2) and (3) above- it skews /screws the ranking system
5) Disagree – "people shouldn’t be paranoid " – tell that to the chinese blogger!!
6) Disagree – "Books scanning project started out with her and Larry Page sitting together" – actually I think it was Her sitting on larrys lap- lap dance style flipping thru Penthouse (ok ok..I just made that up!! :)-
7) Agree – "started to wonder whatever happened to all the other school books of that time – and how many were destroyed by now." I want my "golliwag" in google books :)-

Sorry Philipp, but it was German "Galore" that did this interview: "GEFUNDEN IN ... Galore; Das Interview- Magazin; Heft 17 – April 2006".

number 6 : I think you're right :-P

I just found Marissa Mayers in this video of "60 minutes"
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6105656814603925555&q=60+minutes+google&pl=FALSE
Have you ever seen this video ? (22 minutes long)

Thanks Jan, I corrected this.

have you tried the binoculars feature.. That is something that no one has..

Thank You!

watching this CBS video now---how old is it?

I don't know, it's online since Friday on google video

Marissa clearly doesn't Google much. Clustered searching is extremely helpful. Sure, the majority of users want an instant answer, but they ALSO want USEFUL answers. The instant answer is no good if it turns out to be spam.

Also, certain departments at Google (i.e. the one I work for) require the use of more than just Google. Good for Marissa that she uses nothing else, I guess, but it's really short sighted – Vivissimo often finds things Google can't.

"Vivissimo often finds things Google can't." – like what ?? Clusty is good but. ??

Obviously, I can't give specifics. There's this contract thing,y'know? But it often happens that we look for something with Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Vivissimo or other search engine, and find that Google has missed something.

I love Google, but it's foolish to pretend that it's perfect. It clearly isn't – if it were, I wouldn't have a job!

Brinke Guthrie
I think the video is from January 2005.

Google does have some sort of clustering when they split up the search results into different sub-topics (something they introduced in 2005 or so?). On the other hand, checking the result for e.g. Jaguar shows the top 10 is filled with both Jaguar the car, Jaguar the big cat, and Jaguar the Operating system. Back in 2004 Google even experimented with the kind of cluster links on top of organic results we see on other search engines:
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2004_04_17_index.html#108219183096510580

Wow, Marissa is hot.

I'm a huge fan of Google, really. I use it a lot. But I'm tired of Google. I want a new interface. A new kind of indexing and presenting information. Less data, more wisdom. Yahoo, MSN Search and Ask.com don't help me much. I don't see enough innovation. Google is the new Altavista, remember my words, in the years to come we'll see the new Google.

"It's interesting, but not really useful" sounds like something a Microsoft product manager would have said about Apple in like 1994.

(snip)
   Asked about an Ask Jeeves feature which allows you to narrow a search by clustered topics, Marissa answers: “Do you want to know what I really think of this? It’s interesting, but not really useful.”
(end snip)

I wonder if she or Google has had a change of heart about this, since Google just bought the "Orion" search technology from the Aussie PhD student.