From CNET News
Google's Varian: Search scale is 'bogus'
By Tom Krazit
Google's Hal Varian would likely have raised an eyebrow at a term paper submitted by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the search market.
Varian, currently on leave from the University of California at Berkeley [and the School of Information] to serve as Google's chief economist, thinks a lot of the arguments advanced by Microsoft in justifying its 10-year deal for Yahoo search are, in a word, "bogus." Microsoft has said that it needs "scale" to compete in the search market against Google, saying that larger amounts of traffic and data allow it to improve the quality of its search experience.
As might be expected, that's not exactly the way Varian sees it. He's perhaps best known for perfecting the ad auction system that generates the vast majority of Google's huge profits, having worked for Google since 2002. But he also holds forth over the array of statistical data and processes that Google uses to make just about any decision....