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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. :)
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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.
..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.
That doesn't mean jack-sqaut in a civil suit which is what I was mostly worrying about in my parent post. They can subpenoa just about anything and everything.
You have less rights in a civil case and the burden of proof is much lower.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
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/
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.
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)
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!
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*