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Thursday, May 19, 2005 6:39 PM PT Posted by Harry McCracken
Ten Things I Didn't Know About Google
I spent most of today at an event called the Google Factory Tour--which involved neither a factory nor a tour, but turned out to be a worthwhile opportunity to hear a bunch of Google people talk about Google the company, Google the array of services, and Google the philosophy. (If you're sorry you missed it, check out this Webcast of the whole thing, including me asking a couple of questions.)Tidbits gleaned and lessons learned:
1) The most immediately newsy news was today's launch of the Google Personalized Homepage, a sort of "My Google" that lets you plunk recent Gmail messages, Google News, newsfeeds from providers such as the New York Times, weather, and other bits of information onto Google's homepage. Personalization of this sort is a very old idea (My Yahoo has offered it for years), but Google's take on it looks typically Google-esque: It's simple, functional, and fast. Google's lab page lets you try it right now.
2) In the long run, the most meaningful thing we heard about today may have been a Google Research translation technology that involves statistical analyses of texts that are available in multiple languages (such as United Nations documents). The examples that we saw included a couple of Arabic-to-English translations that were, apparently, utterly perfect. If this process reaches a point where it works as well for documents of all sorts, and is available to everybody, it would be one of the most profound things technology has done for us since...well, the search engine.
3) Google is readying a software package called Google Earth, which is a Google-ized version of Keyhole, an astounding 3D mapping program from a company that Google acquired. It includes some built-in searching features that let you do things like see driving directions rendered as photographic flyover animations of actual the route you'll take.
4) Google is often compared to Microsoft these days, but one key difference between the companies is that Microsoft loves to talk about unreleased products (sometimes years before they show up), while Google is still rather secretive. Company execs almost apologized for showing us the unreleased Google Earth at all, and wouldn't say when it might ship or what it might cost. (You can download a demo of the current version here.)
5) Lots of folks--including me--are sometimes mystified about why Google gets into some of the businesses it enters. For instance, its Picasa 2 is a fast and fun photo organizer, but it's also free--and Google has never said why it got into the photo game, or how it hopes to turn a profit at it.
During the Factory Tour, we heard over and over of Google's mission--"to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful"--and its 70/20/10 philosophy, which involves spending 70 percent of the company's resources on its core business (search), 20 percent on closely related areas (such as news), and 10 percent on oddball projects. We also heard that the company was originally founded on cool search technology and a strong but vaguely-defined faith that search would eventually be a powerful way to make money.
Those elements--a desire to organize information, a yen to experiment, and a willingness to do neat things first and figure out how to make money with them later--go a long way towards explaning Picasa and other Google side projects.
6) Google leaves a service in beta as long as it has specific features it thinks the service needs, but which it hasn't implemented yet. Which apparently means that the company still has designs on improving its Google Groups Usenet archive, which has been in beta for years.
7) The company says that it knows the Google Web Accelerator caused problems for some sites and users, but says they weren't as bad as some critics claimed. It says that the experience taught it to test products more thoroughly before making them public. It also said that the Web Accelerator had unexpected trouble dealing with poorly-coded Web pages--which startled me a bit, because you'd think that if anyone knew that the Web is full of sloppy Web pages, it would be Google...
8) How many servers does it take to run Google? Nobody knowns--the company will only say that the last reported number was 10,000. (Some folks speculate that the current total could be as high as 100,000.)
9) It does say that it builds all those servers itself, which just may make it the biggest hardware do-it-yourselfer on the planet.
10) If you work at Google, you may end up with an untraditional job title...such as "Spam Cowboy and Porn Cookie Guy" (and that's one employee, not two).
If the above musings aren't enough for you, Search Engine Lowdown has a moment-by-moment blog report, including a review of the lunch that attendees ate (which included a "Googley" bistro salad).
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wow, i am a huge fan of google. They r great. This info was interesting.
I don't see any mention of the coolest beta yet!
Try this site. http://maps.google.com/maps
Now listening to Marissa I fine the first site she mentions is Google maps!
Google is a drug a zillion times stronger than LSD. I have to use it in my non-tech related job. If I don't while my competitors do, then I have to switch to a job on which technology hasn't changed for at least a thousand years.
One important literacy test recently conducted in China had only one question on it: Do you know what Google is?
I read in PC World around 9/11 that Google was fowarding searches to the DOD. Was this true and do all search engine's do the same?
What gives here? A google is the number one followed by onehundred zeros. I have no idea what you guys are talking about. It does not compute!
actually, that's a googol...
Its interesting that the vibe of the company philosophy seems to have rubbed off on its employees.
Google has a window to become a world leader. As you mentioned above,' Don't talk about coming products two to four years before release.
In many ways Microsoft is very generous and apologetic. Microsoft could do much more if it didn't burn so much energy on damage control.
God design is SIMPLICITY and better design is more functional SIMPLICITY.
Software with a 747 dashboard of controls is old fashiond. Passe!
New software should comprise of a bullet-proof chasis and a group of plug-ins one can select from one by one.
Google this is your opportunity. Stay friendly. Avoid the temptation to use excess leverage or 'blackmail' with your dependant customers. In other words avoid cashing in unfairly on the little guys and you can sail ahead free and clear like Tim Horton's here in Canada.
73s TonyGuitar at BendGovernment.Blogspot.com
I just would like to say a thing that makes me bored with google..
HEY GOOGLE GUYS! WHEN DO YOU CHANGE YOUR PAGE LAYOUT TO BE GOOGLE AND NOT TO BE SIMILAR TO YAHOO!
Its about time! I HATE the yahoo page layout and i get pist when i see google its very similar...
I could not search the answer on the web how many "keywords" Google is holding on their system. Does anyone?
Great info!!
***I'm trying the Google Personalized Homepage right now***
^^Extra: You have to get a Google Account to get a Personalized Homepage.^^
terraserver-usa.com had maps before google
google is a good program and all but i like Yahoo better.
R.I.P Rick James
It was great haveing
you on the show
> dude
> terraserver-usa.com had maps before google
No one said Google did maps first. The maps on Terraserver and the maps on Google aren't comparable. Try to get driving directions from Terraserver. Try to get average household size from Google through its map interface. You can't do either. The mapping on Google is fine for what it does (the quality of the on-screen street image pretty much blows Mapquest out of the water; Terraserver's satellite maps are sometimes more detailed than Google's).
I STILL LOVE GOOGLE ^_^
i seriously doubt that you can have a translation from arabic to english being "perfect"
Printing the directions from google maps still needs work. The line from the from and to points gets taken off both at home and at work and the little markers for the starting and ending points are not very precise.
You forgot to mention their socialism-inspired censorship.
Listen up, everyone: don't listen to spooks, or to those who shill for them.
I know why Google bought Picasa and how they plan to make cash from it, if the old business plan is still the business plan since the company was bought by Google.
It's good having friends who know this stuff. ;)
All I'll say is, people will either love it or hate it.
> YoYoMa
>i seriously doubt that you can have a translation from arabic to english being "perfect"
well...i think any translator software can't translate just perfect, google's even from spanish to english can't do it, it requires a lot of ai, but at my point of view, google's translator is one of the best out there.
Maybe I'll start a company called Googolplex
Google is a great search engine except for the amount of censorship it does. There are things I'll get many pages of information for from Dogpile but get "0", Nothing, Nada, Zilch from google.
Believe it or don't, Google cow tows to the MAN!
mapquest did sat. shots three years ago....in color with no watermarks....terraservers' images are over ten years old...older than me....
mapquest does not own its sattelites. They are billion dollar corporate sats, usually owned by larger communications companies. It costs 10s of thousands of dollars to buy time on the sattelites, and often times there is a long waiting period. Its very expensive for companies like mapquest to keep their sat images up to date for this reason.
Google means much to me. It helped me know Search Engine Optimization, Adwords, Adsense, Affiliation & other great things very easily.
Thanx Google
Google is one of the most friendliest search engines out there with a lot more features to explore the vast universe we call the internet. Cannot do without it.
How about a 11th thing you have just now learned about Google? Google violates its own mission statement to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" by implementing and maintaining a visual verification system (AKA CAPTCHA) that locks out blind people from performing tasks such as account creation, blog creation and password resets. Despite more than six months of constant advocacy from the blind community, Google has absolutely refused, through total silence and lack of responsiveness on the matter, to implement a solution as simple as a link to an audio playback of the characters to be entered in order to gain access to the secured resources! Please cover more accessibility issues such as this.
Thanks.
Google is now the worst search engine since they give priority to advertiser. If you do not pay your web page go second page or far away.
I get back to metacrawler search engine. They have sponsored links but the results are much better than google now and anyway they also use google search engine!
Yo People, it's a search engine, there was a time when Yahoo's stock was $260 a share and everyone thought they were untouchable, another company can come along with a better search algorithm and do the same, get a life, I use google for my web searches, but aside from that, they are just another corporation, not a verb, not a person, but a corporation who will sell whatever info they can once they start running low on cash....
Search for FAILURE on Google and look and the first two links it shows.
Priceless
Thanks so much for this great site!
Read more about me craps
http://crapsadvice.com