Slashdot Mirror
The Man Who (Really) Makes Google Tick
An anonymous reader writes "Like his friends Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Craig Silverstein abandoned his PhD studies at Stanford to become employee No.1 and technology director at Google. While building the search engine in a garage, never in his wildest dreams did he think Google would become what it is today. Not only is it the envy of software giant Microsoft, Google continues to redefine the technology market with its creativity and tenacity. In this in-depth interview, Silverstein discusses a wide range of issues including the backlash against Gmail among privacy advocates, the company's cultural changes and its shifting reliance on PageRank."
If you want to know more about this guy, just google him :)
--- To each of us a Truth is given.
Is not having all your personal information in the hands of Google. I don't feel that Google is the threat here. They've proved time after time to be an honest company. I'm more worried about some crazy new law (Patriot Act anyone?) giving the Government / Other corporations instant access to this online archive of some of our most private information.
"You have portrayed the ideal search engine as one resembling the intelligence of the Starship Enterprise.."
My new geek idol
Slashdot sucks
Because of this man's great efforts, we can google for 'failure' and be greeted with President Bush's Biography.
Technology never ceases to amaze me. :)
-
I've always wondered if Google will shut down once it hits a google of webpages indexed.
Drop the PhD study where right now he would probably be teaching at a college to kids who really couldn't care...knocking back 40k/yr. Or now be worth a few hundred million dollars. *Sigh* Reminds me of the day some hippy asked me if I wanted to join his computer company, darn thing was in a garage somewhere. I wonder whatever happened to him. Well I turned him down and now i'm a Walmart manager! Watch out for falling prices!!!!!!!
Like in the WiFi market? Or with Quicken???? Does someone still uses Money?
Lots of companies succeed against MS. Not that it's the easiest thing to do in the world, but it's doable. Google might be another Intuit.
He says: "I think that understanding language is kind of the last frontier in artificial intelligence, and then talking to a computer will be just like talking to a reference librarian, because they will both be equally knowledgeable about the world and about you. "
Now I love Google and don't mind the privacy implications of Gmail, but for the PR nightmare they just had you would think he'd be a little more careful. I am not sure I want computers to be knowledgeable about me (individually).
What's even funnier is that Google is not intelligent whatsoever. All it can do is find webpages. It doesn't answer questions, it can't look up facts, it can't verify any informational searches for accuracy. It just finds websites. When you stop to think about it you realize that Google is not all that amazing. Important? Yeah but not that amazing. And nowhere near as smart as a librarian.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
..is the "why is Google so successful?" question. This interview seems pretty focused on talking about "hot" topics (gmail privacy, microsoft, blah blah), and it talks about possible future technologies in Google, but the interview doesn't probe about just why Google got there in the first place. Where's the talk about what Google did differently? PageRank (before its manipulation by spamdemons), clean design, obliteration of banner advertising and "portal" services, clear separation of search results and "related advertising" results... that's the compelling stuff that I'd want to hear the man behind Google talk about. Those were all pretty bold moves from an economic standpoint ("what, you want to remove banner ads?! how do you expect to make money!!" etc etc), and by golly, it panned out and then some. Someone should go back and ask, "how the hell did that succeed, how did you convince people to come on board and work with you on Google when it was so damn different?"
One thing's for certain: The guy does an excellent job of keeping up Google's mysterious aura. When asked if the number of servers was 10k or more like 100k, he said "over 10k". When asked about future technologies and directions for the company, he always answered vaguely ("I can't comment on specifics").
This is pretty cool. The aura that google has that no one knows how it works, and no one knows where it is, and no one knows what it's doing... That's a pretty cool public image to have for something used as much as google is. I just wonder if investors are going to want to know more about what's going on.
~Will
sig?
What bugs me about Google is all the aggregators and useless pages-full-o-links-without-any-content sites that show up so high in the results when you are seeking, for example, technical information about _X_ piece of hardware.
Was looking for setup details on a Siemens router today, so I googled the brand and model #. The first few pages were results from overpriced worthless drop-ship web "retailers" instead of useful information. Isn't that stuff supposed to be over on Froogle instead?
I remember the last time there was a big brouhaha over something that Google did, which was when we acquired the Usenet archives from Deja.com
/. in one day.
The last brouhaha people had was when Google de-listed xenu.net completeley over a complaint from Scientology.
It was March 2002. Buying out Deja was 2/12/2001. Scientology lead with 2 stories on
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
At least in the US, a good lawyer can make a case that the PGP will self-incriminate based on the fifth amendment.
I dont know about the other parts of the world.
now supporting:
cmdrTaco for president '04
michael for oval office intern summer '05
Hrm...apparently plain-old-text mode dropped the ... </namedrop> wrappers that I put around the snotty-sounding "I'm having dim-sum with him next Sunday" comment.
Oops. That'll teach me not to use the Preview button.
Google continues to redefine the technology market with its creativity and tenacity
Really? I don't mean to be a troll. I like google and all but what have they done differently since the first day they opened for business. They're search engine just works great and that's it. They're in a position to do more but what? Does gmail constitute N billion in market capitalization they're going to pull in when the IPO goes through? Makes one wonder what they're going to do an not be "evil".
A clean page and what used to be some nice results sold me.
Biggest selling point it that they haven't driven me off with obnoxious ads and really stupid search results.
Google hasn't been blatantly evil to me yet.
In fact have they been provably evil at all, outside of designs on lunar domination?
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
Of all the companies that Microsoft has ever competed agains, Google is the first one where Microsoft is fighting a battle in enemy territory.
Microsoft's victories come in the software front (Netscape, Quicken, Office, etc.) where they can leverage their operating system dominance.
Google's home turf is massively scalable, reliable web services. Even though much of it is secret, all signs point to an incredible advanced platform that keeps these things running. Its highly redundant and distributed, using some cutting edge research and open source technologies. If Microsoft were to try to utilize Windows to power such a platform, their developers would soon discover how laughable Windows is for such a solution. Not that Microsoft isn't smart, but the culture of Google lends itself much better to success in this field than the culture of Microsoft.
I am, however, looking forward to Microsoft going up against them, as it will allow us to point out yet another failure in them trying to move beyond their core business.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
man - if google could improve searching for porn what a relief that would be. Currently I have to wade through bucket loads of fake links, booby pop-ups, fake free pics, virii and other crap. I hope they improve the search engine so that it delivers the best free pussy on the net.
They can't practically do a full search across everyone's email for a particular keyword. To do so, the providers need to offer this kind of service, which they haven't been built to do (data persistence, indexing etc.). Alternatively, the FBI/CIA could just install snooping boxes at network hubs, but again this isn't practical for realtime searches given the volume of mail going around the world every day.
On the other hand, Gmail is (the first system yet) specifically designed to make searching across its datastore as easy as searching the web. Now, for the first time, large scale email snooping is practical. The FBI/CIA can just get a special privilege account from Google, with the ability to search everyone's email for keywords just like we do now when searching the web.
Laws don't mean much if enforcing them is impractical. Gmail and similar systems if they catch on make new laws practical.
As an internet webmaster, I certainly would like to hire the guy for a little SEO work. From the sounds of the article, this guy sounds like he knows what makes PageRank tick.
The rest of us only find out through experimentation.
Hey, I'm the number 2 Nigruitude Ultramarine site on the web!
Drop the PhD study where right now he would probably be teaching at a college to kids who really couldn't care...
There are plenty of Ph.D. drop-outs that signed up with other companies that looked just as promising as Google and didn't make it. This sort of career choice is basically a lottery ticket with a rather high cost of entry--even if you ever manage to get back to grad school after your failed stint at a startup, it's going to be hard to get back into research.
If you want to make money, a Ph.D. is the wrong choice to begin with--go into business or finance or something like that. If you change your mind about getting a Ph.D. halfway through, again, there are far better career choices than to get involved with some startup.
Sign up with a startup in a technical capacity only if you feel passionate about the product or the work.
Google is known for their new and interesting technologies. I stumbled across this search engine right before reading this article actually. A search engine that clusters your results! It makes it even faster and simpler to get right to what you want. It's nice to see new ideas like this coming out and helping to change the direction of search engines as google did several years ago.
http://vivisimo.com/
that google was just a juy sitting behind the wall that knows everything.
Just like the standardized testing grading machines...
~mingust
I don't know about anybody else, but I have noticed that, lately, Google seems to be rather polluted by people who are exploiting the PageRank system to get higher listings. You know the types -- the url is of the form www.domain.com/your-exact-keywords.html, and the page doesn't actually have any content. Google is fantastic for anything that hasn't gone main-stream, simply because advertisers aren't Google-Bombing (heh, I can't believe I actually said that) those particular words yet.
Don't underestimate Microsoft. I'm sure they can outdo Google if they put their mind to it. They have the clout, the technological know-how, the financial backing, and they are not afraid of playing dirty. Eventually Google will make a mistake ; maybe a key employee will leave for Microsoft, something like that, and anyway Microsoft employs lots of smart people too.
What does Google have that Microsoft cannot duplicate, buy or steal, given enough time and resources?
...his thoughts on negritude ultramarine
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
One, Silverstein acknowledges that AI problems are basically hopeless (gonna take "about 200 to 300 years").
Two, when asked if PageRank is dead and what they are doing to fight false popularity, he says they are "tweaking it in new ways".
Three, when asked how ("do you have algorithms?) he answers,
OK, they are looking at the anchor text. Then what? As long as HTML is the language, I'm afraid there aren't that many more things they can do.Time to cash in, perhaps?
This is...
O
U
T
R
A
G
E
O
U
S
!
I find it more obnoxious that they filter zip archives with executables in them.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
If you had bothered to read the FAQs on Gmail instead of being anal and cribbing here, you would have noticed that Gmail allows a total email size of 10 MB.
The reason? they don't want you to use it as your personal hard drive on the web. If you want a hard drive, use one of the hard drive websites. This is perfectly understandable since they must have done their calculations on how much space a person would really use, and that would be based on emails and regular attachments, not file backups.
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
Yeah, and that's just salary. The real money is in research grants. I have an acquantance who works as a lab tech. Her boss, a PhD at UCLA, usually has about a dozen or so research subjects running at once, with each being funded by one or two grants. In fact, the only work that individual does is think of new things to research and file the appropriate papers, grad students and lab techs do the actual work. Pretty good gig, if you can put in the 20 years of school and work it takes to get it.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I've been seeing this a lot lately, and can't understand why people screw it up so badly.
"Sentance" refers to a non-existing word, but is probably a mispeling (PI) of "sundance". "Sentence" is a grammatical unit that is syntactically independent and has a subject that is expressed or, as in imperative sentences, understood and a predicate that contains at least one finite verb. The sentence should read "The sentence should read "I'm far more worried about the divorce lawyer or the ex-employee with an axe to grind than I am about the Government."" Yes, yes, typos happen, but this happens so often that I think people honestly think they're saying "sentence" when they're saying "sentance".
Yes, yes, typos happen, but this happens so often that I think people honestly think they're saying "then" when they're saying "than".
Seeing mistakes like the one you describe makes me so angry that sometimes I think I might loose control.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
Email messages are stored in many different formats, usually separately for each user or group of users, on several servers. On Unix systems, mail is often just kept in one file per user before delivery. On Company servers using Exchange or Lotus, it will be in several database like files, on Yahoo or MSN, I don't know but I doubt very much there's a single huge database you can SELECT from.
For any one given mail spool, it's trivial to search the messages for a keyword, but that's not the practical problem. The practical problem for somebody wanting to search every user's email together is to perform all the trivial searches over all the servers over all the operating systems over all the storage formats used by all the organizations being investigated. With Gmail, all this is moot if, as everyone claims, they have one single huge distributed storage system for everyone's mail.
Perhaps you would better understand the following analogy: currently, searching everyone's email is like you surfing the net with a web browser. You hop from one machine to the next, from one page to the next, doing a bit of searching and a bit of looking for where to search next. With Gmail, everyone's mail is indexed in one easy to use place, so searching mail becomes like web browsing via a search engine. It's just so much easier there's no comparison.The DoT, namely C.S., used to be on the list of Google Executives.
Any comment on *this*, I mean...hello? Mr. Brin? Mr. Page?
Did Mr. Silverstein just dematerialize or what?
"In an interview before Google's IPO filing, Silverstein discussed [...]"
*yawn*
define:answer
>> questions
Something like, say, 200 miles in metres?
I don't know,
If Microsoft wanted to they could develop clean interfaces too. Microsoft's reputation is not that bad, except that it is known that they don't play nice with others.
But still, if they do develop a worthwhile engine, on par with Google or better (they have very good researchers, they are certainly capable of coming up with something) and put it as the default search engine in the next version of Windows and the next service patches, then Google could find itself in trouble.
Microsoft has tremendous leverage with its users by virtue of most of them not being very educated and not caring about interfaces all that much as long as it sort of works.
My points are still valid, even if my psuedo-code is not 100% correct -- but you miss my point: any of the large webmail providers (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc) will still be able to search all the email in any users mailboxes, almost as easily you can log-in on their respective homepages. It would be a fallacy to think otherwise. Of course, these services already do -- just like Gmail -- have one huge store for all their users' mail, even if it is distributed, as you mention.
It is my belief, gained through knowledge of mail servers -- and too many years real-world experience writing high-end web-services/front-ends of one kind or another -- that SQL is the most scalable solution for the back-end of a web-based email system with this quantity of users, the idea of using any kind of file based mailstore is unpractical for web-based email for a number of technical reasons.
Furthermore, if I remember correctly, in the past I have read articles about the big webmail provider's back-end systems being SQL based (sorry, I can't remember which company the article was about -- I think I've read about more than one..(?)).
Your analogy about searching everyone's email is moot: we are not really talking about searching everyone's email spool, rather, people are arguing over whether Google's webmail -- Gmail -- is any less private than any of the other big webmail solutions (Yahoo, Hotmail) that are already out there -- and it's not. It's no better, and no worse -- but they are being more upfront about things (i.e. explicit about their business/technical processes) in their privacy policy than some of the other providers care to be, which has brought this matter into the eyes of the general user (who probably do not realise that when they click 'Delete' on Hotmail, a copy of their message may indeed still reside on another of Hotmail's systems in an archived backup, unaccessible to the all but the sysadmins -- and the respective law enforcement agents/agencies, if they have the right paperwork).
In this statement (and possibly inferred in some other statements) you make it sound like Gmail/Google will index everyone's mail-server's mailstores like it indexes webpages -- it won't. Gmail only indexes the mail of Gmail users.