Recently, I have been working on building a new search engine.  After performing some searches on Google, I ended up watching a tech talk from Marissa Mayer. Marissa is vice President  (Search Products & User Experience) at Google. Just to give you a background here is a short summary of her bio, she has an impressive experience (found on the google site) :

Marissa leads the company’s product management efforts on search products – web search, images, news, books, products, maps, Google Earth, the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Health, Google Labs, and more. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer and led the user interface and web server teams at that time. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google’s search interface, internationalizing the site to more than 100 languages, defining Google News, Gmail, and Orkut, and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com

I saw her presentation named “Scaling Google for Every User” (June 2007) at the Seattle Conference on Scalability. I really liked the part where she talks about how much features should be presented to end users, how to present them and how basically simplcitiy beats complexity. She kinda destroys the myth that “having more features is always better”.