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'."

Comments

Apache

[jcraveiro]

That way of naming things is indeed very usual; for instance, "Apache Server", was named after its status of "a patchy server".. ;)

Re:Apache

[gimpboy]

My understanding from the article was that the inventors of google didnt know how to spell googol. Where as the apache folks new how to write 'a pachy server', and were just being cute with their words.

So a misspelling isn't really the same as a cute pun.

6 types of email users

[Tellarin]

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.

in the name...

[Turn-X Alphonse]

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.

Re:I dont think thats true

[spac3manspiff]

LIARS!
Go to http://googol.com/.
That guy made it in 1995, they probably couldnt buy it and spelled the less creative 'google'.

Servers

[digitalgimpus]

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.

Re:Whaa??

[Jozone]

and I agree with you, but a submit button, is that too much to ask? I think thats a solid 30 seconds in Sam's teach yourself html.

3 types of email users - what are the others?

[The Mutant]

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?

Re:3 types of email users - what are the others?

[Skim123]

You know what's interesting (IMHO) is that new software products have changed my (and others, I'd imagine) email profile. I used to be a user who filed frequently, since I use Outlook and Outlook's search is slooooooooooooooooooooooooooow. So I'd have a gaggle of folders and have rules that sorted incoming mail. When I responded to certain emails, the mail would get moved to a new folder, and so on.

But now with tools like Lookout, Google Desktop, and others, I can search my inbox in a split second. And thanks to these tools I'm now moving emails much less frequently and have even collapsed some folders down, to simplify the hierarchy overall. I just search now. I would now call myself a user who files infrequently.

One consequence is that the number of emails in my Inbox keeps growing. My goal used to be to keep it under 200 emails (I'd be sure to file away enough emails to keep it under that limit), but I'm currently over 1,600. No motivation to file away, just search and --boom--, there it is.

It's not a spelling mistake, it's a trademark

[poboxbot]

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?

unconscious grammar

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Barney Google?

[dpbsmith]

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"

New College Thing

[BSDevil]

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.

I'm Feeling Lucky Quicksearch

[contagious_d]

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.

Re:Kogal?

[The Hobo]

Actually Google isn't the only company with an accidental name, if any of you know what a Ski-Doo is (snowmobile), a reporter who interviewed Joseph Armand Bombardier about his new invention was told its name was to be a Ski-Dog, but the reporter typo'ed it and named it a Ski-Doo, and Bombadier stuck with it to this day.

Re:Whaa??

[iamlucky13]

I'm not a granny (IANAG), but I do use a text editor (notepad or vim, depending on my mood and location). Frankly, it gives you more control over your code than the WYSIWIG approach, although last time I developed for pay, I used Frontpage because it was so easy to switch back and forth between the code view and the preview panes and I wasn't doing any scripting for most of the project.

HTML 4 isn't crap at all. It cooperates very well with CSS to make pages with easy to control layout and reasonable seperation of content from layout, which makes broad changes to a site's style far easier than sorting through dozens of individual pages changing 'td width="120"' to 'td width="121"', when you find that your .gif borders don't line up properly. I won't deny, as some do, that learning the W3C specs is a little more complicated than just typing out old school HTML 3.2, but there's no good reason for an advanced developer not to teach themselves the latest tools.