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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"?
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.
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?