A "Fireside Chat" with Google's Sergey Brin: "Sullivan: 'What do you do to go beyond links as a way of improving results?'
Brin: 'There are completely new ranking technologies that we are working on. We try about a half-dozen a month and launch on a limited test basis. We fundamentally work with all of the world's knowledge. There are just different ways to approach that. There are many, many things you can do, and we're not going to exhaust them any time soon. Over time, our searches will only get better.'
Sullivan: 'Will you ever consider supporting paid inclusion?'
Brin: 'You want to keep any kind of payment separate from organic search results. I think it's important to distinguish those things.'
Sullivan asked, 'What do you think remains largely unknown about Google?'
Brin answered, 'The tilde operator,' a new search command that enables users to search not only for a particular keyword, but also for its synonyms. This is accomplished by placing a ~ character directly in front of the keyword in the search box. He also mentioned, 'The calculator,' which enables users to solve mathematic problems by entering numeric expressions into the google.com or the Google Toolbar search boxes. The engineer who created the calculator was supposed to be working on our 'spelling system,' added Brin."