Google's Seattle engineering office last night held a series of "tech talks" for Seattle-area computer science academics and engineers. Yes, it's hard think of a nerdier way to spend a Thursday evening, but it was an interesting glimpse behind the scenes -- delving into Google's efforts to shrink the download size for Chrome updates, adjust its index for the real-time web, and optimize its online apps.

On the subject of the real-time web, engineering director Peeyush Ranjan outlined the challenges Google faces as it tries to incorporate new and updated pages into its index to make sure people get the latest information -- trying to figure out what's truly important to surface at any given moment, while still giving appropriate weight to well-established pages.

Their solutions so far have included improving core search technology, allowing sites to ping Google with changes, faster computation of Google's PageRank algorithm, and leveraging Google Hot Trends. But Ranjan said there's a lot more to be done, and he briefly referred to real-time search and the fact that a lot of new information now can be found on Twitter before it's found on Google. Here's a video excerpt.

At the outset of the evening, Google Seattle site director Brian Bershad told the audience that the event wasn't intended explicitly for recruiting. However, he noted that the company's local operations are returning to a growth phase after previously slowing substantially.

Bershad said he was happy to report that Google Seattle was "back into a mode where we're looking for extremely strong talent."

Update: Here's the audio of Bershad's comments and a separate talk from the evening about Google Chrome updates: MP3, 11:22