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What's It Like to be Google's Boss Techie?
We'd like to welcome Google Director of
Technology Craig Silverstein as our next Slashdot
interview victim... err... guest. You think you
run a big Linux server farm? Craig's is bigger.
Think your Web site gets a lot of traffic and
creates a lot of headaches? Just think what Craig
must face! Post whatever you'd like to ask Craig
below, one question per post. About 24 hours after
this runs we'll email Craig 10 of the
highest-moderated questions, and we'll post his
answers shortly after he gets them back to us.
How do you avoid business pressures to make short-sighted solutions, and consistently make good, common sense ideas work instead of adopting ones from marketing sources? Not only does Google have the best search engine technology, but you consistently do the "right" thing. Clean, quick homepage, text only well-identified ads, interesting research projects, etc...This is the way many search engines start, but they all went the way of the "dark" side instead of adopting the "right" solution. In my jobs, it's been very difficult to execute and justify good engineering (or just common sense) under pressure from the people who control the money. Any advice for driving through well-thought-out decisions instead of adopting the "management fad of the month"?
They have a nice graph, but no scale. I suppose you could do some careful pixel analysis of the graph to generate percentages, but it's a shame they don't list them.
Interestingly, I see "Other" has been steadily rising since it bottomed out in January, and has now surpassed Netscape 4. I would love to be able to click on that chart and see a detailed list of the percentages, and what "other" is composed of. Hopefully we'll see Mozilla get its own line on the graph soon.
It would also be nice to see a breakdown on a per-OS basis. I wonder how many people are running Internet Explorer on Linux? (Seriously, that would indicate what portion of non-IE users hack the browser tag to make web sites happy.)
you're dumb.
10,000 Solaris, HPUX or 2k licenses? No-friggin-thank-you-very-much.
How can you possibly test bugfixes/changes that need to get deployed to thousands of machines? Furthermore, how in the heck do you deploy the changes once they're tested. I understand you probably can't describe the exact process, but perhaps you can enlighten us on some principals learned on the subject of CM on such a massive scale.
In fact, there is an opposite concern. Whether through a network of links or through coordinated googlebombing [googlebombing.com], weblogs frequently show up near the top due to the nature of reciprocal linking between the blogs. Not saying that's good or bad (sometimes a sole voice is a better expert on a topic than CNN), but it is what it is. Ranking "links" seems valid enough, but then you ask if that includes machine-generated links by someone's aggregator and the issue becomes a little more cloudy.
Why haven't you implemented yet the toolbar for open source browsers? Are there technical difficulties or rather lack of interest from Google?
Furthermore, estimates are that search engines miss a large portion of Internet content available. There must be literally millions of web pages that don't even show up in your cache because they are too small, or because nobody links to them. But there may be a site out there that has all the information you could ever want to know about some esoteric topic that only the person who created the site and the few friends that person may have...but since nobody else links to it, nobody else knows about it.
So how do you find those treasure troves? And how do you decide which ones are treasure troves and which ones are the millions of "all about me" web pages? Or do you care?
FYI: That Heinlein novel was named Friday.
Now...if Google wants to stay on top with me, I'd like to see the following:
I can come up with a lot of things saying 'how to make search engines more useful'. Now if only someone would listen.
Kickstart