Yelp Search: Information Retrieval in the Real World

Colloquium

Speaker(s)
Jason Fennel
Date
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Time
4:15 PM
Location
Galileo Pryne

Information Retrieval presents models for the retrieval and scoring of documents. While these models work great in idealized cases, they are only a start when applied a real world domain like local search.

This talk will cover the building blocks of a search engine. We will look at how those concepts are applied to Yelp’s local search and some of the difficulties inherent in maintaining user experience while scaling our local search system.


About Jason Fennel

Jason Fennell is Technical Lead for Yelp’s Search and Data Mining Team and has been with the company since 2008. He is a graduate of Harvey Mudd College ‘08 where he received a CS/Math major. While at Mudd he was a Proctor of South Dorm and unicycled a little too much.