56 | New Scientist | 16 November 2019
The back pages Q&A
Most of us take Google search for granted.
Daniel Russell is one of the people who makes
it work, and he has a surprisingly simple trick
to make your searching more effectiveAs a child, what did you want to do when
you grew up?
I went through multiple early scientist phases:
ornithology, botany, palynologist, marine
biologist. But at 16, I discovered computer
science. It was a single path after that.Explain your work in one easy paragraph.
I try to understand what people do when they’re
searching for information. That is, what strategies
and tactics they employ when looking for
something simple (say, the population of London)
and what they do differently when they try to find
something more complex (the distribution of
dog breeds in London over the past 200 years).
How do people think about their search
processes? What do they do as they search?Did you have to overcome any particular
challenges to get where you are today?
As a first generation university student, I pretty
much had to figure it out on my own.What’s the most exciting thing you’ve
worked on in your career?
Working on Google search is plenty exciting.
In many ways, it’s a global computer system with
many AI subsystems and enough practical
philosophical questions to choke a conceptual
horse. Trying to understand what knowledge
is and how it is made is enough to make a
philosopher weep. But at the end of the day, we
have to ship the code and make it work. Dealing
with that day in and day out is pretty exciting.What achievement are you most proud of?
Generally speaking, all of the studies I’ve done
to understand how ordinary people think
about information, knowledge and wisdom.
We professional scientists think we’ve got special
access to knowledge, but there are more kinds
of knowledge and ways of knowing than we
typically admit. Understanding this – in all its
manifestations – has been deeply satisfying.Were you good at science at school?
I was. In my younger days, I was the prototypical
biology nerd. Then I became a teenage hacker,
beguiled by the power of building computational
systems that could do unimaginable things.Is there a discovery or achievement
you wish you’d made yourself?
Basically, any surprising result in computer
science and cognitive psychology makes me
envious. Examples: the size of human working
memory; the confirmation-bias effect;
multi-resolution image representations.If you could have a conversation with any
scientist, living or dead, who would it be?
Isaac Newton, for all the obvious reasons, but
also because we could chat in English.What scientific development do you hope
to see in your lifetime?
Deep, knowledge-based, explainable AI systems.Do you have an unexpected hobby, and
if so, please will you tell us about it?
I collect writings about pre-European-contact
California. I wanted to know what California
was like before. The answer is that it was a heavily
managed landscape – not what I was expecting.What’s the best thing you’ve read
or seen in the past 12 months?
No question: the BBC natural world
documentaries. Thanks David Attenborough
and the BBC for allowing people to understand
how transcendent our planet really is.OK, one last thing: tell us something that
will blow our minds...
Of all the search skills, knowing how to find
a piece of text on a page (by using Control+F
or CMD+F) is amazingly useful. It makes
you a faster and more accurate searcher. And
90 per cent of the internet-using population
don’t know how to do this. If you are among
them, do yourself a favour and teach it to
yourself. Your online searching will never
be the same again. ❚Daniel Russell is senior research scientist for
search quality and user happiness at Google.
His book, The Joy of Search: A Google insider’s
guide to going beyond the basics, is out now“ Trying to
understand what
knowledge is and
how it is made is
enough to make
a philosopher
weep”
TOP: MANON ALLARD; ERIK MANDRE/BBC NHU