Information Access Seminar

Architecting to Scale

Friday, November 3, 2006
3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Jack Xu, eBay

eBay is one of the largest global transaction platforms with over 200 million users and processes over 300 million searches per day. eBay users trade about $1,600 worth of goods on the site every second. The total value of successfully closed items on eBay's trading platforms was $13 billion in Q2-06. This talk will discuss architectural innovations at eBay and why real-time update underlying the trading platform is important and challenging. This talk will also be illustrated with lessons learned along the way in architecting several large scale systems including Excite (one of the first Internet search engines, launched in 1995), Netease (leading Chinese portal), and eBay (the leading global trading platform).

Jack Xu joined eBay in 2002. He was named an eBay Fellow after serving as the company's vice president of software development. In that role he led development of the company's overall search and listing infrastructure. Jack is currently eBay's VP of Engineering & Research where he is responsible for all aspects of the company's research activities, as well as product development in the areas of search, listing, catalog, classifications, etc. He is also the founding Chairman of eBay's first global engineering center outside the U.S.

Prior to joining eBay, Jack was the Chief Technology Officer at Netease (Nasdaq: NTES) where he was responsible for Netease's technology, operations, marketing, research and product development. Before that, Jack was the director of core technology at Excite. Jack is also an author of a numerous research papers.

Last updated:

March 26, 2015