Slashdot Mirror
Behind the Scenes At Google
An anonymous reader writes "University of Wahington TV Presents "behind the Scenes With Google." From the site: 'Search is one of the most important applications used on the internet and poses some of the most interesting challenges in computer science. Providing high-quality search requires understanding across a wide range of computer science disciplines. In this program, Jeff Dean of Google describes some of these challenges, discusses applications Google has developed, and highlights systems they've built, including GFS, a large-scale distributed file system, and MapReduce, a library for automatic parallelization and distribution of large-scale computation. He also shares some interesting observations derived from Google's web data.' "
Google is actually a giant super computer which has become self-aware. Every person it "hires" is actually one more person it saps knowledge from. In the not too distant future, it hopes to be able to network every human completely so that it can collect the remaining knowledge on Earth more easily.
Man, that's *so* twentieth century. I came to /. for the bleeding edge in information acquisition technology: realtime optical scanning blocks of glyphs encoding human language.
I can't absorb information I can't copy/paste.
I am from a small, grease-loving country in the north called Ca-na-da.
Whoa, whoa.. it's hard enough for us to RTFA but now we've got to WTFV (an hour long one too)?
The average slashdotter has an attention span of 5 secon.. ooh look a birdie!
Can't wait for the "I'm Feeling Lucky" feature on that one!
Now I have some pretty important lists which I need to keep tight control over. The information really ought not be distributed outside my office. However, because of the nature of my business, I must do frequent searches using various search engines to fill in my lists.
If you want to keep something private, don't put it on the publicly accessible internet. Including searches. Duh.
How am I assured that my searches remain anonymous and secure with Google?
You aren't. Did you sign a contract to that effect? No.
And frankly, if you can find things with google, it isn't too secret.
Disclaimer: my opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of Google, Inc.
That having been said, as a long time insider I have a pretty good idea about what really happens "behind the scenes" and let me tell you, both conspiracy theories crackpots and our slashdot fanboys are quite amusing, but the boring fact is that we are neither trying to take over the world, nor are we the best thing since the second coming of Jesus.
We used to be a very successful startup, yes, and now we are a fairly successful corporation. Yes, there are a lot of smart people working here, but don't fool yourself, "the most interesting challenges in computer science" are happening in academia, not in corporations. (Besides, anyone who knows Jeff is perfectly aware that he often tends to grossly exaggerate our importance, but to be honest that is a part of his job which he is doing really great.)
All in all, I love to work here, I thing there are a lot of very smart people here, but if you think that we are the only place on the planet where geniuses cluster lately, you are just not being reasonable. If you want to find real discoveries you have to look in places where people don't have shareholders telling them what to do. The point is that we haven't done anything new per se, only the scale of our implementations is unprecedented.
For example, in my 20% time (Google allows us to spend 20% of paid work time on personal projects) I am working with KeyKOS right now and let me tell you, this is what I call innovation. It was done in the '70s and no mainstream OS has implemented its ideas to this day so far. I'm sure that when after a decade or two a Big Corporation (be it Google, Microsoft, Apple, or IBM) reimplements KeyKOS, the Slashdot crowd will wet their pants screaming "wow, what an innovation!" completely forgetting that it was an innovation back in the '70s of the 20th century when Norm Hurdy et al. were working on it quitely with no buzz and fanfares. Please remember that "The Next Big Thing" is always an old idea but this time backed with $$$ and marketing. Please never forget it, or otherwise the people who are worth their salt will only consider you uneducated.