Googling Google

I had needed to do some research for a bit of trivia about Google for the article "No Fancy Website Needed". I heard a rumor that the Google's sparse design was in fact because their founders did not know enough about HTML to want to fiddle with the code for too long, and so they used a sparse design in order to put up something quick. I need to find an article to confirm this rumor.

The first thing that I do in any research project is to start with a web search using Google.   That leads to the question what happens if one were to google google? 

That's right, you guessed it.  If you type "google" in the search textbox at Google.com, and then press the button "I'm feeling lucky", you get back where you started from.   Pressing the "I'm feeling lucky" button takes you directly to the website of the first search result.   No doubt that if you search for google, you get google.com as the first search result. 

(The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button is also a source of a lot of "google tricks".   For example, try typing "google easter egg", "make google logo black and white", or "google linux" and then clicking the "I'm Feeling Lucky button".)

If you typed "google" in the search box and pressed the regular button of "Google Search", you would see some news results about google, you see results like "Google Maps", "Google Reader", "Google News", and "Google.org" (which is the philanthropic arm of google). 

In the first page of the search results, I also see an Wikipedia entry for Google.  Great.  Wikipedia is another great research tool.  So I read the Wikipedia entry to see if it can confirm that bit of Google trivia that I am looking for.  Alas, not this time.

So I have to do a better search.  I typed in the following queries into Google: "google original home page", "google home page design", "google original web design did not know html", "web design of google homepage", etc. 

In the process, I found some interesting things such as video of the Google founders presenting a talk, Google's patent of its homepage, picture of google's original homepage in 1997, and origins of Google's logo.

In particular, the link "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine" keeps coming up in the various results.  It turned out to be the paper that Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page wrote at Stanford University when they were thinking about the web searching algorithm.

In any case, the bit of trivia that I'm looking for is not as readily forthcoming as I would hoped. However, I persisted in searching because I felt that the rumor had some basis. And finally found the article linked here that confirmed the fact that "The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface." (as quoted in the article linked above). The article was written by Alan Williamson who attended a lecture by Google's Marissa Mayer in January 2005.

In retrospect, I would have found this article immediately if I had typed in "google founders did not know html" in the search. I just had to get the right words to type into the query.

Of course, I am not the first person to consider what the idea of googling google. For fun, there are at least two videos about that -- one here and one here.