I'm Feeling Lucky (65 page)
Authors: Douglas Edwards
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* All important Google meetings after this one included a digital countdown clock that showed speakers how much time remained before they had to end their presentations.
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* Overture subsequently sued InfoSpace, a move that sent other potential Overture partners a rather negative message.
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* Director of search technology at Yahoo.
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* There were still tweaks to be made. When the
New York Post
ran a story about a murder victim whose dismembered body was found in a suitcase, AdSense displayed an ad for a luggage store next to it.
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* The founder of Pyra was Evan Williams, who left Google to found another startup that eventually evolved into the social-networking company Twitter.
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*
http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-06-21/opinion/21919208_1_google-algorithms-human-editors
.
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* Google changed the name from Froogle to "Google product search" in April 2007;
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1038_3-6177393.html
.
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* This is known as dynamic IP addressing.
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* One example: If a user wanted to remove all her data from Google's logs, how would she prove it was hers? Her IP address was probably not unique, and family members might have shared her computer, meaning their search data would be tied to the same cookie.
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* ISPs know every site you visit, including Google, though they probably don't retain the sort of historical data that Google has collected.
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* Early on, Larry asked Jim Reese to remove the filter. Jim objected, but Larry insisted. The two dozen people working for Google at the time watched the raw query stream in shock. A large percentage of the terms were pornographic. "Ohmigod," one staffer remarked. "That's what people are using Google for?" After fifteen minutes, Larry asked to have the filter restored. It stayed in place after that.
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*
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/06/technology/06goog.html
.
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* MLo now heads up the team of Google Doodle artists.
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*
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20030226&slug=microsoft26
.
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† Larry told me once to change an underwriting tag on public radio so it didn't say Google was "a technology company." He didn't want to tip off Microsoft that we had bigger plans than just search.
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* I spoke with
Simpsons
creator Matt Groening about having Larry and Sergey voice their own characters, but he was skeptical. Microsoft had also asked for a cameo, but had not been pleased when Bill Gates was depicted crushing Homer's startup dreams and saying, "I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks."
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* CP+B won Microsoft's $300 million account in 2008 and created the "I'm a PC" campaign.
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* The name was changed to "orkut" because the
Eden.com
domain was not for sale. It was intentionally not capitalized to distinguish orkut the service from Orkut the engineer.
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* "Slashdotting" was a well-known online phenomenon: a site was mentioned on
slashdot.com
and all the users congregating there immediately went to check it out, causing the site's servers to crash under the sudden load.
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* And in Finland for a brief time, because "orkut" in Finnish means "multiple sexual climaxes." Once people realized the site was not for romantic hookups, traffic quickly fell off.
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* Google bought DoubleClick in 2007 for $3.1 billion.
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* Figueroa ran for lieutenant governor in 2006 and came in third among three candidates in the Democratic primary.
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* There were technical issues integrating software from Pyra Labs, the blogging company Google had bought, and there were legal questions about whether launching a new communications vehicle so close to the time we were planning to file for our IPO would violate an SEC-mandated "quiet period."
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* Larry and Sergey have always had a thing for cheap restaurants. They celebrated the initial funding of Google at a Burger King and negotiated the $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube at a Denny's.
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* The line was from a GEICO insurance commercial popular at the time. A week after Google went public, GEICO sued Google for allowing their competitors to place ads on search results for their name.
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* For example, the founders' insistence on valuing the company at $2,718,281,828, which is the product of the mathematical term
e
times $1 billion.
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† Timothy J. Mullaney, "My Google Grubstake,"
BusinessWeek,
August 16, 2004;
www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2004/tc20040816_6051.htm
.
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* "Going gold" meant the code had been finalized and was loaded on a master disk, ready to ship to the manufacturer for production.
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* I liked "Gu-Gu," a nonsense sound reminiscent of a bird's song or a baby's cry. Our Chinese staffers felt it was too informal. In 2006, Google chose Gu-Ge, or "harvest song."
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*
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions,
by Edwin Abbott (1884).