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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'."
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
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".
LIARS!
Go to http://googol.com/.
That guy made it in 1995, they probably couldnt buy it and spelled the less creative 'google'.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
Programmers who can't spell? Now I've heard everything!
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!
"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...
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.
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
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.
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!
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...
http://www.computer.org/micro/mi2003/m2022.pdf
This is probably what I consider the top non-search related feature on Google. It allows me to virtually mash the keyboard in the general vicinity of what I meant, and then follow the suggestions.
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".