Celebrating Six Months at Google New York

Today I celebrate six months of working at Google. I’m having a great time, and I wanted to take a moment to share a bit about my experience thus far.

First, a bit about Google’s New York office. It is a major office–in fact, Google’s second largest office and an R&D powerhouse. New York Googlers played key roles in two of Google’s recent developments: real-time search and the results page re-design. Less visibly but not less importantly, engineers at Google New York contribute to every major aspect of Google’s technology.

My own contributions have been toward improving local search. Local search represents an increasingly large and important fraction of people’s online information seeking. At first glance, it might seem to be an easier problem than general web search, since there are only tens of millions of places, compared to tens of billions of web pages. But local search poses unique challenges–from data quality to ranking to supporting exploratory search.

Another area that I’m especially excited about is the work on structured data. The Magpie team is based in New York. You may be familiar with them as the team that developed Google Squared–which powers the “something different” links for web search.

Of course, there is far more going on at Google New York than I could hope to summarize in a blog post–including lots that I can’t talk about yet. But I hope this at least gives you a taste of what it’s like to work for the world’s best search company in the world’s best city (yes, I know I’ll take some flak for at least one of those superlatives).

If you’re interested in learning more, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I may have drunk the kool-aid, but I promise to be candid and as open as I can about what it’s like to go through the hiring process and what awaits you at the end of it.