[Search-l] Short interview with Jeremie Miller

[Seth Finkelstein]

On Sat, Sep 29, 2007 at 09:14:18AM +0900, Jimmy Wales wrote:
> Though I agree with Jeremie that the questions are a bit silly, I
> think they are easy enough to answer:

[Thanks for the reply - Jeremie, learn from the master! 1/2 :-)]

>>    1) Roughly, how many people will be *paid* on the project?
> ...
> What I am saying: I really don't understand what the question means,
> other than that.  Our number of employees will be dependent on the
> course of the project and on the success.  Just like every other
> organization on the planet.

	I had elaborated in my original that it was based on this news
report, I probably should have included that in the post:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136082-c,sites/article.html
"Actually, we might spend a quarter million dollars this year on the
                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
whole search project, on the engineers we pay, the search we run. ..."
                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

	I was wondering, e.g. how many engineers were meant in that statement.

	There's no "gotcha" hiding there. It was in "good faith".
I didn't phrase it in a lawyer-like manner because I didn't expect
that to be necessary.

>>    1b) Can you specify whether at developed vs. developing economy pay 
>>scales?
>
> We attempt to follow ethical hiring practices around the world.  Like 
> Google, Yahoo, and I suppose every company, we try to pay to get the best 
> people... for us, this means trying to pay on the high end of the scale 
> necessary to attract the best talent...
>
> One thing we have a moral commitment to doing is offering stock options 
> even in countries and cultures where this is not the norm.

	And every company faces issues of outsourcing and offshoring.

>>    2) Do you plan to hire anyone with search engine development 
>>expertise?
>
> Yes, of course.  What a strange question.

	Not a strange question at all, given some of the list discussion,
and many of the weaknesses John McCormac has pointed out.

>>    3) Do you think there's a cultural conflict between Wikipedia's 
>> model of operating, where in theory nobody owns any articles, and code 
>> development, where typically specific people "own" various subsystems? 
>> Which path do you plan to try to follow?
>
> I do not anticipate that we would attempt a "wikipedia model" for code 
> development.  Traditional open source development models are well-tested 
> and proven.

	OK. I'm honestly relieved to know there's no plans to treat
the codebase as if it were a Wikipedia article. I wasn't sure.

> One objective for the search project is to find ways to push editorial 
> judgments (and even in the selection of algorithms and parameters for 
> algorithms there is editorial judgments) into the public for transparency 
> and community control.  Just exactly how to do that is one of the 
> interesting questions we will need to solve.

	Yes, understood, but there's a huge amount of infrastructural
support work that needs to be operational and maintained before that
becomes a limiting factor in result quality.

-- 
Seth Finkelstein  Consulting Programmer  http://sethf.com/
Infothought blog - http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/
Interview: http://sethf.com/essays/major/greplaw-interview.php