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Google Tidbits
XeroCool writes "Alan Williamson got invited to BayCHI lecture at PARC by Marissa Mayer (Product Manager for Google) to talk about google and get the facts. They both were in a room and Alan got some good facts about Google. One fact was: The name 'Google' was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for 'Googol'."
They wanted to emulate a Googlephonic Stereo.
This
...about the pool on the roof.
How could someone not know HTML, yet be able to write googles algorithm? Dont most programmers laugh at the easyness of html?
Peep that
is there some type of founder that is other than the original one?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
The letters "e" and "o" are pretty far from eachother on a keyboard.
Slashdot was originaly supposed to be Slashbot, home of the slicing, dicing, humanity destructing robot of death. Good thing for us they had a spelling error in the domain name and just made it news for nerds.
That way of naming things is indeed very usual; for instance, "Apache Server", was named after its status of "a patchy server".. ;)
The article highlights the key to Google's success: constant feedback via formal studies and data analysis, and access to very large data sets. It's like the webmaster that pours over his Urchin stats and tweaks his website according to his current traffic patterns.
That kind of dilegence makes for an improved quality of experience for the person visiting the site, and increases the traffic for the webmaster. Google applies that same dilegence on a global scale.
I Want To Believe
Some very interesting facts indeed.
But the one that really caught my attention was the one about the 6 types of e-mail users. I'd really like more info on that.
Anyone has any idea where to get more info on this? Still haven't found anything.
-- SouNerd.com
Sheesh... you would think that they could have at least Googled for the correct spelling.
Looking at Googol and then Google you have to say it was one hell of a lucky mistake. Google rolls off the tounge and everyone knows it's easy to spell where as googol is just an annoying nameto think about.
Googol
Goggol
Googgol
Gogool
All lookf airly similar and alot of hassle to for average idiot to recall. So if thisis true Google got lucky as hell.
I like muppets.
"I feel lucky" is nearly never used. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.
Exactly, "I'm Feeling lucky" keeps "Google" search from looking naked for some odd reason. It's Genious.
I think it's a subliminal messege to stop researching for your english project and search for "Paris hilton nude".
too much browsing of the search engine leads to being goggle eyed.
or perhaps too much ogling leads to google.
or perhaps the name was simply a googly, a cricketing twist.
Of related interest, UW Seattle had Jeff Dean of Google give a talk recently about Google's engineering setup, including the GFS and MapReduce: WMA and RM videos here.
Not really that foxy... but then again, my brain might be immune because of watching too much midnight entertainment...
Nobody still has detailed their servers.
How many, specs, data centers.
People have guessed, and analyzed everything... but still no true official statement.
That's what I was really hoping for.
Still interesting though.
Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.
Please could somebody let my boss know. Pretty please.
liqbase
Actually, I don't use Google because of that annoying feature. It pops up even when I mean to type in what I have typed in. I'm not saying they should remove it entirely, but, I wish they would at least have a way to turn it off. Otherwise, I'll stick with the search engines that don't have that annoying feature.
10.# The name 'Google' was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for 'Googol'
Wow that was close. Some more typo and we'd all be kogaling instead.
> I'd like an evening with Marissa Mayer
And I'd like a nite with Carmen Electra.
Don't you guys find embarassing the history of all these "I-thought-I-knew-how-it-was-spelled" names? Google, Novell, Cisco (?) etc. Seems like all those ivy founders had major educational problems. I would probably modded as troll if I were to say that another funny coincidence strikes me - they are all americans. But I'm not saying it ;-)
Excuse my poor english, as I'm not a native speaker, just a poorly educated east-european.
Because there are already enough dupes, without making one for every time someone misses an article
Hate to break it to you, but that's often the base selection criteria for a lot of public-facing people. Basically, you're being manipulated via the hormone method. Get yourself some good porn and the glamour soon wears off.
The best way to find the correct spelling.. silly boys
For an even foxier pic, go to the library and find the Jan. 10, 2005 issue of "Fortune". She has a picture on the front cover, in which she barely peeks over the address label area, but that's not the picture I'm referring to. The picture you want is on page 45, in the upper right corner. Let's just say I think it's a rare woman who looks so damn cute in a turtleneck.
Looking at Googol and then Google you have to say it was one hell of a lucky mistake. Google rolls off the tounge and everyone knows it's easy to spell where as googol is just an annoying nameto think about.
Yes, it's amazing how a word you've seen and heard almost everyday for the past, oh, five years is easier to say and spell than one you aren't familiar with. What an incredible coincidence!
You can't take the sky from me...
It's not like you found that information out from a forum that you're a member of.
Never seen any of those?
e
Google
Gooogle
Goooogle
Gooooogle
Goooooogl
Gooooooogle
etc.
Ok, I'll be here all week.
Programmers who can't spell? Now I've heard everything!
IT explains how they tripped (or not) into being.
there was going to be a new Google service, Google Tidbits. Disappointed I am.
As I already pointed out quite a while ago, the name was not chosen by accident and it should be read as go ogle. Porn is behind everything, man!
They both were in a room, you say? That is a good fact!
I'm not sure about the use of small user populations for testing.
I wrote something about this in a blog article, though the references have yet to be added which I'll do later today.
However, I'm happy to admit that Google seem to be doing plenty of correct things. Gmail has become my email of choice so the interface can't be that bad, and the main Google page has always been cool for me. Before that, I used to use alltheweb.com in preference to the big portal sites, but Google's results seemed, well, better. Alltheweb kept returning pages of documents from the same domain which was frustrating.
"The infamous "I feel lucky" is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button."
Well, it makes sense if you think about it. Everyone wants to feel lucky...and I doubt a "I feel apathetic towards the world and my creator" could fit there, anyway...
Give the AC some slack. ;)
michael is obviously tired, and forgot to log into his account.
Dupes can and do happen, some are excusable, since they are really old ones with alternative titles, others just fall under the net of after leaving the front page, but before google has picked them up (slash search sux!).
The last kind (on the same front page) is just inexcusable
liqbase
http://www.linux-mag.com/2000-04/behlendorf_02.htm l
Quote: The name literally came out of the blue. I wish I could say that it was something fantastic, but it was out of the blue.
It just wasn't a priority.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
link is goatse
ah, mod points
Classic.
l
I'll have to use that in my sig.
Try out MSN. We're eager to serve you.[1][2]
[1] See http://members.cox.net/kaiotea/serveman.htm
or http://www.scifilm.org/tv/tz/twilightzone3-24.htm
[2] To spammers
"Porn is behind everything, man!"
Even SlashCrunchPop.
I tried Google, Yahoo, Dogpile and A9 and all of them just liked back to Mayer's blog.
:
Google's Scholar found two papers citing THREE types of email users
1) Users who don't file at all
2) Users who file frequently
3) Users who file infrequently
This paper cited a paper by Whittaker and Sidner, titled Email overload: exploring personal information management of email
It seems filing is the primary category, but I'm foxed about the other three. Any ideas?
A message from our sponsor
Whats so facinating about Google ? Its a search engine, a good one and a pretty cool company....but thats all.
There are thousands of other cool companies out there that could be worth a headline, instead we get such things as
"Sergey and Larry stuck in elevator!"
I had heard awhile back that "Google" is so named because you cannot solely trademark(TM) numbers or words expressing numbers.
Is this not the case?
http://www.nic.cx/suspended.jsp?domain=www.goatse. cx
... goat.cx, on the other handBesides, it's on-topic (for this thread) which is about the 6 types of email users, and the clueless who contribute to the spam problem by clicking "reply" or "unsubscribe" to spam - the same kind of people who would click on a superfluous link w/o checking to see where the link points to, etc...
The problem with these grammatically silly story summaries is that the posters don't really read them themselves before they submit. And the Slashdot "authors" who accept and publish them seem to also give only the most cursory check of how it will sound when read by a reader. It's largely a problem of a kind of arrogance: already thinking you know what it says, so not even seeing the mistakes you made when you wrote it.
Paris in the
the spring.
Many people have to read that many times before they see the error, because the expression is familiar enogh that they merely recognize it from the familiar words, rather than actually parsing the words themselves. Unfortunately, this is a flaw deriving from the excellence of human communications recognition, tolerant of transmission errors. Tech can help address it (like putting black text on a different randomly colored background for each word, or parenthesis for each word, for "edge enhancement"), but it's really a bug in our technique.
--
make install -not war
There is another interview with her here.
:-)
Among other things, it talks about how many links they have on the main Google page. There's also a funny bit about some guy who sometimes sends them e-mail containing only a 2-digit number. They finally figured out the guy was e-mailing them the number of words on the main Google page, presumably to let them know he is getting annoyed when there are too many (e.g. when it got up to 52 words).
Oh, and there's a much bigger version of the picture of her from the previous interview, here.
They both were in a room and [...]
Wow, someone knows how to make a story sound exciting.
The one who is wise,
to him you show every detail of how to use the Google API to the last SOAP call
The one who is contrary, for he will demand exact results on an poor query and be angry when google fails to produce
The one who is foolish, who can not understand the basics of queries.
and the one who does not know how to search. to him you will show the basics of how to search
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Google search on Marissa Mayer. No nakid pics, move on.
Too bad... I thought it was a portmanteau of Googol, ten to the hundredth power, and Barney Google ("Baaaaarrrney Google! with the goo- goo- googly eyes!"), whose name is correctly spelled with a -gle. Barney Google was a comic strip icon of the Roaring Twenties, and the title of the Billy Rose hit song of the same name and era.
Barney's horse Spark Plug was so popular that Sparky became an common sobriquet; indeed that is the source of Charles M. Schulz's nickname.
Google lives on in rare cameo appearances in the comic strip, generally known as "Snuffy Smith," whose full title is actually "Barney Google and Snuffy Smith"
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
actually i think the spelling mistake was on the part of the investors before Google got launched. so many of them spelled Googol as 'Google' on the funding checks that they figured it was easier to stick with Google than go back and ask all their contributors to 'please write us out another check, but this time to the right company'.
something tells me calling them illiterate would have been bad for business.
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
not only that, but since google is not a real word, it makes for a much stronger trademark.
Based on what you say, this seesm to be the new form of College recruiting Google uses. A few months ago Google came and visited McGill, and did a 2-hour presenation on the basics of GFS, but primarily on MapReduce. Included was a few demos by the presenter (Karel someone - used to be a McGill prof) demo'ing some of the internal MapReduce funcctions, like calculating the number of links between words and the number of MapReduce keys needed, and so forth.
Plus, they gave out free pens and T-Shirts. The actual recruiting part took up about 10 minutes - only a brief mention of what it was like working at Google. Good presentation tho.
Cue The Sun...
This is very old news according to this.
goatse picture, on goat.cx
ah, mod points
I noticed one of these trials. I sat at a desktop--I forget exactly when--and that time Google looked something like this. When I saw what would be Google's new look on another PC, I was wondering what happened (and a bit jealous--it was my big brother's).
I like the new Google.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
With the slicing, they produced chips, and with the destruction of humanity by dicing, they produced a smooth dip.
Chips and dip -- the only way to go!
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I think it's a bit suspicious that the founder of Yahoo! is Timothy Koogle.
Methinks the google guys sorta put their competitor's name and a word that conveys 'hugeness' together, but they can't say that it's based on Koogle's name for legal reasons.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
The only time I use "I'm feeling lucky" is with the firefox quicksearch of the same name. It can save some typing for those of us who are exceedingly lazy.
-
The file is, and always has been, "hello.jpg", otherwise known as "the Receiver".
From the wiki:
You're both right. The name came about because the guy who thought of it thought it sounded interesting rather than the generic "spider this" or "web that" kind of thing.
However, the name was adopted because it fitted well since the server was indeed "a patchy server" at the time. Had it not sounded like a pun on the status of the software it may not have been adopted as the name.
Hence, you are _both_ correct.
Silly rabbit
http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/05_01/googles- pragmatic-datadriven-approach-to-user-interface-de sign.html
i .html
http://notebook.geekdom.net/pages/baychi-google_u
The second one even has something about the 6 types of mail users:
- File and delete (don't leave anything in the inbox)
- Hunt-and-peck, comfortable with lots of unread mail in their inbox
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Back to the present, I think I use Google for over 90% of my searches now. Its simple dialup-friendly interface reminds me of what Yahoo used to be.
Scan that ;)
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
It's a google search for goatse
Probably even more for User Interface positions. I like that interface :P
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I would prefer that every damn application utilize its own, unique, and poorly documented formats. I mean, all that metadata is such a hassle when you want to go in and understand what a file contains! It gets in the way and is overall just so tacky.
Join Tor today!
One Google founder = Russian. Perhaps? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Gogol
Yes, these are the kind of facts, backed by hard-hitting invesigation, that I come to Slashdot for!
From the article:
12. They listen to feedback actively. Emailing Google isn't emailing a blackhole.
I'm pleased to hear this. I occasionally use Google Groups and they seem to be developing a new layout. However, I'm not too keen on the new design.
When viewing a newsgroup, Google Groups currently displays subject, date and most recent poster in a horizontal line. This makes it easy to scan the page because dates, subject and poster are all neatly aligned on top of each other.
However, the new design displays small excerpts from messages instead of just the message headers. This is the default view, but you can change it by clicking on a View Titles Only link.
The new "viewing with message text" display makes it difficult to scan the page. Everything seems to float a bit arbitrarily on the page because there are no longer any strong visual cues to guide your eye around the page. No more neat alignment. What's more bizarre is that the most recent post to the newsgroup doesn't always appear at the top of the page(!).
There's also a rather meaningless "Active older topics" column (at least I haven't quite discovered its purpose!). The new design does offer some new features, such as the ability to "watch" certain topics, but overall, the appearance of the new beta feels inferior to the current design (at least to me).
Perhaps it would be worthwhile emailing Google about these concerns though, if they really do listen to feedback.
http://images.google.com/images?q=marissa+mayer&hl =en&btnG=Google+Search
n/m
I feel dumb. I got the spelling wrong, too. I had to look up googol in order to find out that it was 10^100. Duh.
you are correct.
for whoever grabs it first...
d 28 c47-1dada44d52
http://gmail.google.com/gmail/a-b769ad95ec-02ae
[several stories credited to founder interviews deleted]
Sigh.
I had assumed it came directly from "google" (to stare at, especially if through glasses), which came from "ogle" perhaps via "googles" (glasses - a corruption of goggles with a bit of "ogle" thrown in). Both were slang terms in use in the '50s, at least in southern Michigan.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Going through Williamson's blog points one at a time, I will state the inaccuracies in those which need revising:
1. Mayer never said the Google founders "didn't know HTML." What she actually said was that Brin came up with the original look, but decided not to add complexity because "he said he didn't do HTML" (emphasis theirs), as in he considered it pedestrian and didn't want to bother with it.
3. It wasn't search usage that doubled when they fixed the spell-checker's back-end, nor is it correct that they found the bottom to be best. Here's what Mayer actually said: the original spell-checker ("Did You Mean" feature) was very bad and would make suggestions like "Turbotax" -> "Turbot ax" and to keep it less conspicuous, they kept the spelling revision suggestions in light grey text at the top of the page. Then, they improved the spell checker from the back end, and saw that the click-throughs of the "Did you mean" feature doubled. As the feature got better, they made the text larger and red, and this caused click-throughs of Did You Mean to double again. However they noticed many users were still complaining using the feedback link at the bottom that the search results weren't useful, and when they checked what the search was of those users, they found misspellings (i.e. users had overlooked the Did You Mean at the top). So, they added an additional Did You Mean at the bottom of the page, to catch those people, and the click-throughs doubled once again.
5. It's not so much that Orkut didn't have go through the normal Google UI procedures, it's that because it's his 20%-time personal project that he's still toying with (most of which he did in 4 days, according to Mayer), it's not really part of Google's official feature set. It's really just that guy's personal project that they may use at some point down the road. Mayer never said anything about the "loads it places on the system," so it's unclear if it's hosted on Google servers at all, or if high volume is even an issue.
6. Mayer didn't say Excite@Home users often get to see new features. What she said was that a long time ago, they did one experiment where they wanted to see if having thumbnails of the search results was a good idea, but they knew they would need to find high-bandwidth users to test it on. So, they decided to use Excite@Home's IP range to test it on them, and they got so many complaints from those users (mostly due to having many fewer results above the page fold as a result of the thumbnails), that they scrapped the idea. There was no indication they did any more experiments with Excite@Home or other broadband users exclusively.
7. When she said they have the largest network of translators, the context is that Google has a site where you can sign up to help translate Google's help pages and interface into your language: https://services.google.com/tc/Welcome.html
11. The 6 types of email users were discovered over the course of qualitative observations of users brought into the lab to test Gmail (and often observed from a distance, to give the user email privacy). Two specific types of emailers she mentioned are: "file & deleters" and "hunt & peck folks, who are comfortable leaving some emails unread".
Would that I did have a scanner. It'd be up and available right away. But alas...
See this portrait: http://www.bartnagel.com/portraits/mayer.html
That beats out the Fortune pic by a mile. Thanks!
Anyone for a Marissa Mayer Fan Club?
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
There needs to be a +1 Hilarious Irony.
The real Google innovations are ways of ranking pages, and especially their entirely RAM-resident database that returns very quick answers. Neither of these requires much knowledge of HTML, certainly not the more "advanced" features.
Google doesn't need to know much HTML. [...] The real Google innovations are ways of ranking pages
These are two conflicting statements. HTML contains many pieces of information that Google could utilise to rank pages better. For example, keywords within strong, em and heading elements tend to be more important.
The sad thing is, Google really don't seem to employ expert web developers. The rudimentary HTML and CSS they use for most of their websites could be improved upon in myriad ways - often with the result of saving bandwidth and speeding things up. And as cute as their uses of XMLHttpRequest are, they've recieved a lot of criticism wherever they use Javascript.
Their data storage and parallel processing stuff might be innovative, but they can't even comply with the W3C specifications or implement best practices when it comes to anything visible to the public.
There are many old school coders who loath it, go to Usenix and ask anyone over 30 what they think of XML.
The essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not
solve the problem well.
-- Phil Wadler, POPL 2003
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Hey I tried 'Google' at google search box. It didn't suggest 'Googol' to me :(
....:)
Then I tried 'Googol' on search and It didn't suggest 'Google' to me.
I thought they would keep that much as a kind of legacy
dEV
I know this is lame....
Only the nic.cx search is for goatse.cx, which brings up their "suspended domain" page.
C'mon, now - these "buttons" (as you call them) are newfangled tom-foolery - mere bells and whistles ...
The <ISINDEX> element, anyone?
Besides, the aliens didn't start programming the abductees with HTML skillz until XHTML 1.0 came out, so HTML is one you just had to learn on your own, back in the day. Take a look at the terabytes of crappy HTML now dragging the WWW into oblivion and it's no surprise the Google developers didn't know it - no one else did, either. The majority still don't, near as I can tell - fer certain no one working in .com knows it...
Screw all this "aych-teetee-pee-colon-whack-whack" shite, anyway... I'd use Google more if they'd fix their Gopher server.
"The Internet is made of cats."