Henzinger Brings Algorithm Expertise to Google
"If you think Google is fast, it’s because we have good algorithms," says Henzinger, sitting in a conference room in Google’s cramped Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. Such good algorithms, in fact, that Yahoo pays Google $7 million a year to use them and America Online tapped Google to be its exclusive search engine last May.
The wife of an Austrian-born professor, who teaches computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, and the mother of two girls, ages 4 and 1, Henzinger typically rises at 5 a.m. to run experiments from her Menlo Park, Calif., home before her family is awake. She leaves work every day by 5:30 p.m. to pick up her daughters from day care and is in bed shortly after the girls’ 8 o’clock bedtime. At work, she shares her office with two other researchers, using a Linux workstation among piles of books on natural language processing.
Google prides itself on fairness; companies can’t rig the system to come out on top. But people still try to fool the ranking algorithm and some succeed. Henzinger is currently at work on a way to outsmart the hackers. "I’m thinking of an algorithmic way of doing this," Henzinger says. Evidently, first loves die hard.
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