I'm Feeling Lucky (64 page)
Authors: Douglas Edwards
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* Deb Kelly looks back on this as a way "to get all the ideas out there. Why not outsource it to Mars? Anything is possible." She ruefully admits, "I could never talk about space tethers very convincingly."
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* Devin was one of the few hires who made it through Google's screening process without a college degree, an accomplishment he attributes in part to his ability to quickly brainstorm ideas in his interview and in part to the fact that he let Sergey know that he "didn't have a big book of rules to apply to our brand."
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* Some Googlers celebrated their fourth anniversary by wearing a vest to work. Others quit. One engineer with thousands of vested options left the company in anticipation of a quick IPO and a shower of gold. Instead, the company didn't go public until more than a year later, by which time he was whiling away his days surfing the net, living off his girlfriend, and subsisting on ramen noodles.
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* An annual gathering of thousands of free spirits who—often clad in little more than bandannas and body paint—celebrate technology and creativity by assembling unique structures and burning them to the ground.
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† "Google Doodle" originally referred to a multipart logo that changed each day to tell a story, though people now refer to even a single altered homepage logo as a Doodle.
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* Hardware designer Will Whitted once complained, "I hate it when I tell Urs I'm working twenty-four hours a day, and he says, 'Well, I guess you'll have to work nights, too.'"
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* Urs claims this inflection point happened for Google sometime in 2003.
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* A handful of true search scientists—most notably Amit Singhal and Monika Henzinger—did join the company early on, but they were exceptions. Google also hired specialists to build Windows apps and to manage its Oracle database when Larry became convinced auditors would not certify a financial system we built ourselves.
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* Google hired a bushel of Bens. I'll refer to each by his last name so you can keep them straight.
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* John Ince, "Inside Search Engines,"
Upside,
May 2000.
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†
Go.com
grew out of the merger of Infoseek and Disney's online unit and featured content from Disney and ABC properties.
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* Larry and Sergey took leaves from their Stanford PhD programs to start Google, to the chagrin of their professorial parents. Sergey mentioned that his mom would greet good news about Google with the question "So will you be able to finish your degree now?"
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* For "miscellaneous." MISC was open to any Googler who had the patience to read it.
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* Susan Wojcicki, Marissa Mayer, Jeff Dean, Salar Kamangar, and Urs Hölzle were among this group.
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† Meaning that posts had to be approved by a designated moderator before they went out to everyone.
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* Matt dressed as a trench-coated spy for the office Halloween party the same year I went as FBI deputy director Skinner from
The X-Files.
A photo of us somehow ended up on Slashdot, where posters seriously pondered the implications of government agents appearing at an official Google function.
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55. Search engine optimizers: consultants who help clients obtain higher ranking in search-engine results.
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† According to Matt Cutts, at one point automated queries from Web Position Gold—software used by SEOs—accounted for four percent of all queries Google received.
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* He prefers I not use his real name.
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* Including warrants for millions of shares of Google stock once the company went public.
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† FAST Search and Transfer was a Norwegian search company. Microsoft bought it in 2008.
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* Manber became a VP of engineering at Google in early 2006.
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† Yahoo had 48.6 million unique visitors in April 2000, making it number two overall in the Media Metrix rankings for that month, behind only AOL. Google, with slightly more than three million unique visitors, wasn't even in the top one hundred.
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* Keith Kleiner, Shawn Simpson, Frank Cusack, Marc Felton, Gabe Osterland, and Dave McKay with assistance from Jim Reese and Larry Schwimmer, plus Christopher Bosch, who moved into the role of Gerald's apprentice for negotiating purchases.
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† Rackable Systems grew so quickly on Google's business that it went public in 2005. In 2009 it bought the last remnants of SGI (also known as Silicon Graphics), the company whose former headquarters Google now occupies.
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* The average delay in returning results over any given hour.
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* Python is a high-level programming language.
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† Five thousand machines running for twenty-four hours was the equivalent of almost fourteen years of computing time. The likelihood of one or more machines failing during that much activity was high.
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* Googlers would shout "Ben!" just to watch all three heads prairie dog at once, though the Bens soon acquired a Nerf machine gun to discourage interruptions.
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* Anurag worked with Howard Gobioff to integrate the incremental index with the new crawler and with Smith on integrating it with the serving system.
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* For more on orkut, see Chapter 25.
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* We once calculated that serving the extra text characters for "I'm Feeling Lucky" billions of times cost Google millions of dollars each year in bandwidth usage and lost revenue: if users go directly to someone else's website, they bypass the ads on Google's results pages.
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* Amit Singhal joined in December 2000 and led the effort to improve Google's search quality.
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* In 2004 a query on Microsoft's "improved" MSN search engine for "more evil than Satan" brought up both Google and Microsoft, but a search for "evil corporation" went directly to Microsoft's own homepage.
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* Though we did kill BigMailBox, Deja's legacy email service, in June 2001, telling its users that "while Google maintained this service during the transition of the Usenet archive from Deja, offering email does not fit our core mission of giving users access to all information online." Well. Not then anyway.
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* Preparation tip: don't cook the flavoring ingredient more than once, as it loses its potency that way. Just mix it with the butter and fold into the chocolate.
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* Hockey played on ice with a tennis ball and short-handled brooms—while wearing street shoes.
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* Bart Woytowicz, the advertising operations manager, inevitably asked at TGIF how close we were to an IPO. He appeared at the 2003 Halloween party wearing only a barrel to signify the poverty inflicted on him by Google's arthritic grip on the process of becoming a public company.
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* I believed users felt a deeper connection if they learned about Google via news reports or friends and thus felt they had discovered it themselves. Paid advertising depersonalized that experience because "the product" was clearly being sold to many people simultaneously. Danny Sullivan, the noted search guru, described it this way in July 2000: "When I speak about search engines to groups and mention Google, something unusual happens to some members of the audience. They smile and nod, in the way you do when you feel like you've found a secret little getaway that no one else knows about. And each time I speak, I see more and more people smiling and nodding this way, pleased to have discovered Google." Danny Sullivan,
Searchenginewatch.com/2207571
, "The Search Engine Report," July 5, 2000.
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* Fred Vogelstein,
Wired.com
, April 9, 2007;
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2007/04/my_other_interv/
.
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* Tim became CEO of AOL in 2009.
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*
Rainbow 6
was a Tom Clancy novel turned into a videogame featuring a heavily armed paramilitary group.
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* Stephanie Olsen, CNET, December 19, 2001,
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-277198.html
.
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* Referred to as "FIGS" for French, Italian, German, and Spanish, and as "CJK" for simplified and traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
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*
http://www.commercialalert.org/issues/culture/search-engines/
.
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* Other ads team members at various times included Amit Patel, Jeremy Chao, Erann Gatt, Peter Kappler, Radhika Malpani, John Bauer, Zhe Qian, Laurence Gonsalves, and Jane Manning.
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† Chad named the project "Smart Ad Selection System," which was usually shortened to "SmartASS."
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*Eric once interviewed a job candidate who began explaining the problem at the heart of his doctoral thesis and the way he had arrived at an elegant solution. Before he could describe his breakthrough, Eric asked, "Was it a Hamiltonian system?" The candidate stared at him in awe. That answer had eluded him for months. Eric had deduced it from their five-minute conversation.
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* Though, ironically, I was the one who showed Sergey how to press a shirt when he needed to look presentable for an event. We had an ironing board set up next to the massage table. It may be the only time after my interview that I was able to teach him anything useful.
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*Overture reported revenue of $288 million at the end of 2001, up from $103 million in 2000;
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-962209.html
.
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* Mark Sweeney,
Revolutionmagazine.com
, January 23, 2002,
www.brandrepublic.com/news/ 135039
.
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* "Margins may tell Overture Story,"
TheStreet.com
, February 19, 2002.
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* AOL sounded like "Aloha," hence the nickname.
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* For more on AOL's culture of negotiation, see Alec Klein,
Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner
(Simon and Schuster, 2003).
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*
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10003/3089.htm
.
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* Inktomi did have an extensive "paid inclusion" program that allowed websites to ensure they showed up in search results.
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*
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1548269
.
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†
http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jul/21/business/fi-yahoo21
.
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* PMMs focused on marketing our revenue-generating products and working with sales on customer acquisition, market analysis, retention, and loyalty. APMs were usually recent grads in training to be PMs.