When I do German searches, it really amazes me how limited the German Web is. If you search for medical information in German, you get barely anything, whereas in English you get a wealth of information.

Why?

First of all there are fewer [German] people, and the scientific language is English. And then there are not as many Web sites in Germany. Like here, for pregnancy, there is ParentSoup and whatever else, but you just don't have that in Germany -- there might be one Web site if you're lucky. So this is actually more of a service for our international users, so that they can understand the English pages, and get much more information. Of our 100 million queries a day, half are in English and half are in other languages.

I think for Americans, the most interesting use will be translating news articles. Because I think it will be interesting to see what other countries write about the U.S. But the service still has to be improved.

How did you integrate DejaNews, the archive of Usenet postings?

We had Google engineers working very, very hard to get the service out by the time that Deja said they would shut down, in February.

At first it was not clear when Deja actually would shut down. Suddenly it was like, "Now it's going to happen next week," so we had to go live with whatever we had. We did not want the service to be down at all, so we decided to go live and then gradually improve it. You couldn't post initially, but now people can post again. We had to rewrite all the code.

Will Google ever be able to search for things like video and audio on the Web, or is that too hard?

If people know the name of the picture or of the video, then, yes, we can find it. But if people just say, "There was this video of a woman on the beach running into the water," that's hard. The image-understanding technology is not so far [along] yet.

This is far-fetched, but could you combine face-recognition technology with search technology and then search for images of a person based on the measurements of his or her face?

If the research could [be done], we could plug something like that into Google. There are no fundamental restrictions, except that technology is not there yet; the research community can't reliably do that yet.

If I give the system five pictures with your name, and then I get a different picture that shows you from a different angle, it's just very hard to say that it is you as opposed to this other person. So detecting a face can be done, but recognizing that something is a specific face is very hard.

Are you aware that, at the Super Bowl, pictures were taken of everyone's face as they walked in and then compared to a database of known criminals?

Probably what the image-matching technology did there was pull out a few that were [match] candidates for the pictures of the people they took, and then have a human being compare the faces. On the Web we're talking about completely automated, right?

You're right. They had a human check them. How do you feel about the attention you get for being a woman in a field that's mostly men? All the people you manage are men, and so on.

In general, I don't think it's a big deal. Silicon Valley, especially, is very performance driven. It doesn't matter what country you're from, it doesn't matter what gender you are; as long as you perform, it's fine. And if you don't perform, then there's a problem. I think everybody gets evaluated according to the same standard.

When you read about all these Internet companies going up in flames, it must be odd to be working for one of the few that's still going forward.

Being at Google is great. It's kind of sad that there was first this euphoria and now there's the complete opposite -- doom and gloom.

The irony is that there are more Web pages.

And the usage just goes up.

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