History of Google as Chronicled by a Journalist

New York Times columnist Randall Stross chronicles the history of Google in his book "Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know".

The front flap of the book starts out with ...

"Based on unprecedented access he received to the highly secretive "Googleplex," acclaimed New York Times columnist Randall Stross takes readers deep inside Google, the most important, most innovative, and most ambitious company of the Internet Age."

Google was founded in 1998. The prominent people of Google are of course the two founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who had met at Stanford University in 1995 during an orientation for PhD candidates. Page got a Master degree in computer science and Brin was on leave from his PhD program at Stanford when he left to work on Google.

Then there is Eric Schmidt who joined Google in 2001 and is currently CEO of Google. Schmidt attended Princeton University and University of California at Berkeley and holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Stross says "Google employees who sit in on meetings with the executive team see on a daily basis that these three work so closely together that their shared sense of company priorities is all but indistinguishable." ^{[ref 1 page 11]}

Another prominent Goolge employee who is often in the media is Marissa Mayer. Like Page and Brin, she also earned an master degree in computer science from Stanford University and is now Vice Vice President of Search Products and User Experience.

So as you can see, Google is lead by some smart people.

Mayer's joining of Google is an interesting story in itself as described in the SanFranMag.com article "The Adventures of Marissa".

Near her Stanford graduation, she had gotten 12 job offers and narrowed it down to Google and McKinsey. At Google, she had been interviewed by Page and Brin and the interviews continued the following day when one of her interviewer said "I’m not sure I’m able to interview you, as I started this morning and I don’t know what we do yet." ^[2] She was also interviewed by Google's first full-time programmer who asked Mayer to remind him to move his car from the limited-time parking spot when 4pm came around.

Mayer signed on with Google on May 12, 1999 as the 20th employee. According to the article, Mayer's parents "wanted to believe their daughter was making the right decision, but they couldn’t help wondering about the wisdom of her signing with a company that had no revenue, no clear strategy for revenue, and leaders who skated to their graduation."^[2] This was referring to the event on Mayer's Stanford graduation day when Page met Mayer and her parents while riding on inline skates.

When your business is to index all the web pages in the world, your process must be able to scale to that immense scope. Hence, having a good algorithm that produce search results is key. The search results must be completely automated. You can not have humans in the process of "editing" the search results. Although humans can tweak the algorithm.

This algorithm is named "PageRank" a term that has been trademarked by Google and the algorithm has been patented (U.S. Patent 6285999)

For the most part, the algorithm worked pretty well and produced better search results than most other search engines at the time. However, it did run into an embarrassing and controversial situation in 2004 when a Google search of the word "jew" brought up an anti-Semitic website at the top of the search result. There were petitions to remove the site from the results and Google decided to put in an explanation of the search results.

Whereas Yahoo had humans working on categorizing its directories, it was Google's ability to scale using the automated algorithm that moved it ahead of Yahoo even though Yahoo had started the race first. However, one area in which Yahoo has beaten Google was in the human answers arena. Yahoo Answers has built up about 60 million user-provided answers to questions and is seeing about 14 millions users monthly.^{[ref 1 page 181]} Google Answers lagged behind and is no more. Visitors to Google Answers are now presented with a message saying "We're sorry, but Google Answers has been retired, and is no longer accepting new questions."

That brings to question whether there is indeed some value in human contribution. And indeed human is much better than machines when it come to deciding whether a web page content is any good or not.

Stross talks more about this in the last chapter "Algorithm, Meet Humanity". This is when the term "social search" emerged and the first signs of human-power search appeared (such as Mahalo.com). Even Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, had wanted to produce a search service with human contributors that would compete with Google. But Wales's project Wikia Search did not find the success that he hoped for.^[ref]

It appears that Google does believe in the eventual value of social search because it just bought social search engine Aardvark for about $50 million.^[ref] Aardvark is now sitting in Google Labs. This is an engine that allows you to ask a question and real people will be answering it. Ironically, Aardvark was founded by former Google employees.^[ref] It was founded by Max Ventilla, Nathan Stoll, and Damon Horowitz. Ventilla and Stoll both had come from Google.  And Horowitz has a PhD from Stanford.^[ref]

To power the algorithm and store all its results, you need a lot of computer hardware. Google had decided to use low-cost PCs when other companies at the time was using more reliable hardware. But Google built in redundancies into their system knowing that the hardware will fail. As the company grew, they added more and more data centers. At present, it is hard to know how many data centers and machines they employ in generating search results.

In 2007 when Schmidt was asked how many data centers Google had, he replied "I don't actually know." ^{[ref 1 page 12]} But he did admit that there were "dozens" some of which are immense.

Author Ken Auletta writes "Google has dozens of data centers all over the world (the exact number is a state secret at Google), and within these data centers are housed what may be the world's most massive computer system, millions of PCs that have no keyboards or screens and are arranged in stacks and have been repurposed as servers to process searches." [page 110 of Googled]

In November 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. Stross writes on page 119 "YouTube's growth was vertiginous; it could be represented on a graph only with a line that angled at almost 90 degrees. Its rate of growth surpassed those of eBay, Google's Web search, Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, and any other prior Web site."

How Google is going to make money off of YouTube was another problem. In 2007, YouTube was costing $1 million a day in bandwidth while an analyst was saying that he would be surprise if YouTube can even make $20 million in all of 2007. ^{[ref 1 page 126]}

Another problem with YouTube was the amount of copyrighted content that users were uploaded. Although Google is protected under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which says that Google was not responsible for the materials uploaded by user, Google was required to take down any copyright content whenever someone claims copyright infringement and requested it. Nevertheless Google was sued by Viacom for copyright infringement. In the month of February 2007 alone, Viacom had submitted hundreds of requests to take down various content. Google trying to find an automated solution of using "fingerprinting" to remove copyrighted content proved difficult. Revver.com, a YouTube-like service, took the approach of using humans to check for copyrighted content.

In October 2004, Google acquire KeyHole, a company that was only six blocks away from Google. This acquisition gave rise to Google Earth and the integration of images into Google Maps.

Of course, Google has far more many acquisitions than can be listed here. You can see a more comprehensive list of some of the other Google acquisitions on Wikipedia.

"Don't Be Evil" is Google's motto coined by Google's 23rd employee, Paul Buchheit.  Paul Buchheit and Marissa Mayer shares an office and usually both ends their workdays around 3am.^{[ref 1 page 156-157]}  That's right, 3am is correct.   SanFranMag.com article also says about Mayer: "She made it home that night at around 3 a.m., typical for the hours she would keep. ...  Not surprisingly, she's one of those annoying people who need only four hours of sleep a night."^[2]

[1] Google Planet - Randall Stross
[2] The Adventures of Marissa - SanFranMag.com