Microsoft Interview Question Software Engineer / Developers
Team: Bing
Country: United States
Interview Type: In-Person
we ourselves considered 14 different factors when building the rank of the page...do they actually want the candidate to know the entire ranking/indexing process?? wat a loser man..whosoever asked this question...
I dont understand the mentality behind the question though...what are they trying to gauge by this question??
This is asked to get a view into your approach to largescale problems. This question would typically start with searching a single page to see how you do with the base concept, and then scale it larger and larger to see how you adapt your design to something a single box can't handle. Programmers need to know system design, especially in Bing where they only use distributed farm computing, and this is basically a distributed processing design question.
i think most of the comments ignore the fact that searching a book is different from searching the web. Firstly book pages do not have links pointing to other pages of the book so ranking is out of picture. Books actually do have links where the author refers to some other page of the book but that can be ignored. The question is vague because its not clear if the pages of the book are web pages or normal book pages. If they are web pages then the question is literally asking you to build a search engine inside out but if they are normal book pages then the question is not about search engines.
trust microsoft to ask something like this...not even relevant...
- saurabh August 31, 2012so you got to do map-reduce. compute the tf, idf and host of other factors you want. build an inverted index of the keyword to page/link and when all the keywords match then you simply output the link...are you f*****g kidding me Microsoft??