4 Important Technical Questions for Product Management Interview

Follow TechnoManager for more such Product Questions

Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

How does Google Search Work?

There are 35 Trillion pages on the web pages, and to get the most relevant ten results out of all this is very tough. It is something like searching for a coin in the entire Bangalore. Google never search through every page when you ask for any specific query. Google store the information about all the web pages in some database and then search using efficient algorithms across that database to get the desired result.

So let’s understand how Google does it very efficiently. Google use a crawling mechanism in which it crawls over web pages and adds the webpages to the database (known as indexing of the webpage). Then it crawls all the outgoing links from the webpage to find the new webpage and index them. This process continues till Google is not able to find any new webpage. But daily, thousands of web pages are created, so crawling the webpages and indexing them is an ongoing process.

When you search a word in the google search bar, it goes to the entire indexing list and sees which is the most relevant page it should give you. Google use the PageRank algorithm. PageRank algorithm states that the importance of pages can be understood by looking at the number of important pages linked to them. So every webpage has a page score which also depends on the page score of the pages linked to it.

For example, I created a webpage called “TechnoMangers”. Initially, it has a low page score, but if another popular page adds a link to my page (TechnoManagers), then the page score of my page(TechnoManagers) will increase.

The search Engine Optimization industry is always looking to crack the Google search algorithm to boost the page score and get more views to their web pages.

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

How does Spotify Recommend your Songs?

At the week’s start, Spotify sends its listeners a list of songs that mostly match their taste. So how does Spotify send personalized songs to their ~210M users?

Spotify uses an algorithm which sees the following factors

1. All the songs you have listened to and the ones you liked so much so that you have added them into a playlist. Also, look if you have skipped the songs in the first 30 seconds of listening, which may signal your disinterest in the song.
2. It also uses Collaborative filtering while recommending the song to users. For example, I have ten songs in the playlist, and your playlist has around 12–13 songs. Now, 8 of the songs in my playlist match with the songs in your playlist, then Spotify will recommend the other five songs in your playlist to me. Amazon, Youtube, Netflix also use collaborative filtering in their recommendation system. Collaborative filtering becomes more computationally intensive as the user base grows.
3. Spotify also takes the other factors like genres of the songs you liked, past listening history etc.

Spotify should continue to improve its recommendation algorithm because of the following two reasons

1. Since recommendation algorithms will improve as more users onboard the platform, this will differentiate Spotify from other competitors like Apple music.
2. Personalized songs recommendation will increase user’s stickiness

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

How does Facebook decide what should come up in your news feed?

Facebook newsfeed is one of the most important features of Facebook that derives user’s engagement. Newsfeed can alter your mood and ideologies. But how does Facebook decide which post should come up in your newsfeed? Facebook looks into the following factors before putting them into your news feed.

1. The first factor which Facebook takes into account is “Who posted it?”. Facebook will surely show you more posts of the people you have interacted with because it is believed that the post will increase engagement.
2. The second factor which Facebook takes into account is “Post Quality”. The more people interact with the post, the more likely it will come up into your feed.
3. The third factor which Facebook takes into account is the type of post. Let’s say you have interacted with the post that mostly contains “Video”, so it is more likely that Facebook will show you video posts.
4. The fourth factor that Facebook considers is the “Recency “ of the post; Facebook ranked the newer post higher.

Facebook is still fighting the problem of “Fake News or misinformation”. Facebook news feed algorithm is extremely powerful, but there is a danger that it can turn into potential danger with no human supervision. But now Facebook is turning to human beings to mitigate the danger of news feed algorithm

What does API(Application Programming Interface) mean?

API or Application Programming Interface is a connection between computers or computer software. These are the codes that help you get the functionality of other applications or data. There are three types of application programming interface (API)

1. Feature API: This is the API in which one app ask another app to solve a particular problem. Some applications don’t want to invest resources to build a payment system, so they use the other company’s API, whose core competency lies in payment software like PayPal.
2. Data API: This is the API in which one application can ask another application for some data or information.
3. Hardware API: Hardware APIs let the developers access some features of devices like accessing the camera, memory etc.

Hey if you like my content on Medium or TechnoManager and find it resourceful, you can Buy me a Book to show your support and hit that clap button.

Connect me on Instagram for frequent articles updates.

For Quantitative Finance Interviews (Puzzles), you can refer amazing articles here at Quantifiers