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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'."
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.
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.
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.
http://www.computer.org/micro/mi2003/m2022.pdf
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
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".