(nst) Job openings for computer scientists with diplomas in their pockets have been known to be better. Given the current rate of unemployment, it is not surprising that computer cracks are also affected by the lacklustre performance of the economy. No wonder then that the announcement from Google – the world leader in internet search engines – that the company was opening a European research centre in Zurich in spring 2004 was enthusiastically greeted in the entire region.

In the person of Urs Hölzle, a Swiss citizen is sitting at the controls of what the NZZ is pleased to call "the most promising private companies in Silicon valley". A special tie exists between Google's first vice-president engineering and today's "Google Fellow". It was at ETH Zurich that Hölzle obtained his first computer science diploma in 1988 before leaving for the University of California. From there he later moved to Stanford, where he was instrumental in the technical development of Google from 1999 onwards.

On 2nd February Hölzle took part in the job fair organised by the ETH Computer Science Department. The search for suitable contacts amongst computer science students was preceded by a talk to an overflowing audience in ETH's Audimax. Hölzle - the embodiment of a Californian, unconstrained and self-deprecating - talked about Google's recipe for success, in strongly American-accented English. The astronomical number of 200 million hits a day was handled with over-the-counter hardware run on a Linux platform, he said.

It's not the single components of the system that guarantee reliability, Hölzle went on – crashes are a daily occurrence – but the way that the system spreads risk. Currently there are around 10,000 machines standing in Google's computer centres and each search is split into parts that are then dealt with in parallel by about 100 machines. "This means that it doesn't matter much if an entire data centre conks out – it happened just recently. Nobody noticed," said Hölzle laconically.

One-time ETH student and Google manager Urs Hölzle, looking for future workers at ETH Zurich on 2nd February 2004. large

What makes Google different is its so-called "PageRank" technology. This sorts and prioritises queries according to their link structure and not according to content. "It's not what you know, but whom you know", is how Hölzle summarises it in his talk.

Despite this successful strategy a number of problems remain unsolved. Hölzle cites the quality of the search, the scalability faced with exponentially growing numbers of searches, reliability of the system, clustering or separating the wheat from the Spam-chaff as far as usefulness of sites is concerned. Verily – lots of work for specialists. "There are lots of good computer scientists in Europe who don't want to work in the US. Zurich, especially, needn't hide its light under a bushel in this respect," said Hölzle after the talk. He said he had come to ETH to look for motivated specialists who wanted to work on difficult problems. Chances are that some of them will soon be working at Zurich's Google branch, which, according to Hölzle, will employ around "a few dozen staff".