Regular WebProNews readers know all about search engine crawling. For those just joining us, welcome, and enjoy some of the material discussed by Dr. Eustace, including the crawl, as related to us by managing editor Mike McDonald.

“Crawling is just computer-speak for processing a page and all the links on that page, and all the links on that page, etc,” he said. “The important thing to remember is that speed matters.”

“The last time we posted a size of the index it was 8 billion. It’s a lot bigger now.”

Along with speed, Eustace cited the importance of avoiding duplicate results and keeping the index fresh. Eustace estimated that 10 to 20 percent of the Web changes month by month. “Index size matters, since queries have a very long tail. What you’re searching for is completely different than what someone else is searching for,” he said.

“We want the result that you want to be number one. We want people to be able to push the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button and get the best result every time.”

For new companies aiming for Google’s perch atop the search world, think again. Eustace said that as many as a quarter of queries Google sees are ones they have not seen before. “This is why small indexes are not going to be successful,” he said. “A lot of people don’t realize it, but thousands of machines work in concert for every query.”

Spam causes Google problems, and Eustace cited the importance of Google having algorithms that understand site quality very well. He also cautioned on link trading due to spammers getting involved with that activity.

Eustace handled a few questions during his time on stage, and we have some of them here:

Q: What’s being done to improve mobile search?
A: One thing we’re working on is transcribing, taking a page from a large screen and making it available for small screen

Q: How do you make video search a better experience?
A: In video, you have less text associated so therefore you have to ask users to label things for you, using popularity and clicks and things like that. What people expect out of video is different than what people expect out of search.

Q: Datacenters work great for search, but why don’t they seem to handle other services very well?
A: We use the same infrastructure for everything. We don’t make any guarantees that all of our products have the same degree of reliability. We of course try to maintain uptimes but there may be a product in beta, for example, that isn’t on all data centers.

Q: How are you thinking about the use of personal information in making search better?
A: If you understand what people have done over time, search can improve. For example, bass and jaguar: if we know a little more about you we have a better idea of what you’re looking for. My view is some level of knowledge built up over queries is useful.

Q: How do you measure internally the quality of your search?
A: I can’t go into details about how we measure quality. We feel like our search experience is improving, and that we feel like we have a lead over all of our competitors.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Our managing editor Mike McDonald took in the chicken parmigiana and Grape Crush during Google’s Press Day, and found that Google wants everyone to know they haven’t taken their eye off of what brought them into global prominence and everyday vocabulary.

“Yes, we are still all about search,” Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, titled her Google Blog entry, which echoed her comments from today. At the media event, Google unveiled an updated Desktop and three new products.

The Google Notebook will be available next week, but when it arrives, Mike said users will find it works as a browsing assistant. Users will be able to take notes with it as they search, and copy text and images to the Notebook.

“We want people to be able to take the expertise they have and contribute it directly to Google,” Mayer said when introducing Google Co-op. The wildly rumored Google Health appears, for now, to be an offshoot of Co-Op.

In the Co-op beta, users will be able to contribute knowledge and expertise about topic areas like health, electronics, travel destinations, and automobiles. “We can have users offer their own annotations to URLs,” said Mayer, in reference to the feature that permits users to label relevant pages.

Part of that social media construct lets users create specialized links of labeled content to which other users can subscribe. Then, the provider’s labels and subscribed links are added to the user’s search results for relevant queries, Google said.

Google kicked off Co-op in English-language countries, worked with partners to annotate travel and health links, and created dozens of specialized links to content like restaurant and movie information.

The Google Labs team debuted Google Trends. “For the first time ever, Google is making it possible to sift through billions of search queries from around the world to see what people are thinking about,” said Mayer.

Trends will work similar to Zeitgeist, and will allow users to “observe the collective interests of all Google users to gain general insight into topics,” according to Google. “Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. It is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results.”

Google Desktop Beta received an update to version 4. Also, Google announced the arrival of Google Gadgets. Google also made a software development kit available for Desktop 4.

“Gadgets are drag and drop applications/enhancements that work within the Google Desktop environment,” said Mike. “Google Gadgets are similar to the Google personalized start page. Gadgets are little apps you can add to your Google Desktop, for example a calendar, maps, weather info, etc.”

Once installed, Google Desktop asks if the user would like it to build a personalized home page as well. For users who work on different machines, the Gadgets synchronize between them. “It really makes your computer easier, more interesting and more fun,” said Mayer.

Mayer commented on all of the products on the Google Blog, too. “Our new products offer a pretty wide range of services and capabilities, but they have one thing in common: They all enhance and improve the search experience for our users.”

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.