A Personal Perspective and Retrospective on Web Search Technology

This talk is a review of some Web research and predictions that I co-authored over the last two decades: both what turned out gratifyingly right and what turned out embarrassingly wrong. Topics will include near-duplicates, the Web graph, query intent, inverted indices efficiency, and others. While this seems a completely idiosyncratic collection there are in fact concealed connections that offer good clues to the big question: what will happen next?