Don't Be Evil, a Trigger for Ethical Questions

Everyone quotes Google's informal motto "Don't be evil" (it's not "Do no evil") when Google does something questionable. Wikipedia's article for "Don't be evil" includes a fragment from John Battelle's book "The Search" that explains its origins:

On July 19, 2001, about a dozen early employees met to mull over the founders' directive [to elucidate Google's core values] ... The meeting soon became cluttered with the kind of easy and safe corporate clichés that everyone can support, but that carry little impact: Treat Everyone with Respect, for example, or Be on Time for Meetings.

The engineers in the room were rolling their eyes. [Amit] Patel recalls: "Some of us were very anticorporate, and we didn't like the idea of all these specific rules. And engineers in general like efficiency — there had to be a way to say all these things in one statement, as opposed to being so specific."

That's when Paul Buchheit, another engineer in the group, blurted out what would become the most important three words in Google's corporate history. "Paul said, 'All of these things can be covered by just saying, Don't Be Evil,'" Patel recalls. "And it just kind of stuck."

... In the months after the meeting, Patel scribbled "Don't Be Evil" in the corner of every whiteboard in the company... The message spread, and it was embraced, especially by Page and Brin... "I think it's much better than Be Good or something," Page jokes. "When you are making decisions, it causes you to think. I think that's good."

A Google poster that explained "Don't be evil". From Google - Behind the Screen

Paul Buchheit, Gmail's first engineer, who now works at a start-up called FriendFeed, remembers that user's trust was an important decision factor.

At the time that the phrase was created, paid inclusion was a big issue, and we generally felt that it was rather evil due to its deceptive nature. In general, anything that involves deceiving your users is likely to be evil.

I think the most important effect of "Don't be evil" is that it gives everyone license to question decisions instead of simply following orders. I expect that the result is therefore reflected in thousands of small decisions and debates rather than a few large, highly visible issues. The other effect of course is that Google is held to a higher standard.

It's difficult to keep this high standard when you're a big corporation that needs to stay competitive. The difference between Google and other companies is that you'll never see news articles that question if other companies did something evil.

Eric Schmidt sees "Don't be evil" as a starting point for interesting conversations:

One day, very early on, I was in a meeting where an engineer said, "That would be evil." It was as if he'd said there was a murderer in the room. The whole conversation stopped, but then people challenged his assumptions. This had to do with how we would link our advertising system into search. We ultimately decided not to do what was proposed, because it was evil. That kind of story is repeated every hour now with thousands of people. Think of "Don't be evil" as an organizing principle about values. You and I may disagree on the definition of what is evil, but at least it gives us a way to have a very healthy debate.

To sum up,

Don't be evil =

"When you are making decisions, it causes you to think." (Larry Page)
"The most important effect of Don't be evil is that it gives everyone license to question decisions instead of simply following orders." (Paul Buchheit)
"Think of Don't be evil as an organizing principle about values." (Eric Schmidt)

Question Shop

There are so many questions and so little time to find answers for them. Before there was Google and other search engines, people relied on friends, family or books to solve their mysteries.

In 1924, a company from New York launched a question answering service: people asked questions by phone and received their answers after a short while.

Offering to answer any reasonable question telephoned to its office, a firm dealing in general information is said to have set up business in New York City. Subscribers to the service are permitted to put as many queries to the "question shop" as they desire. Each patron is given a code name and, it is reported, can receive aid from the station at any hour of the day or night. It is also claimed that eighty per cent of the queries do not require more than two minutes for an answer.

This reminds me of Kevin Fox's imaginary Google circa 1960.

{ Found by Modern Mechanix. Image used by permission. }

Gmail's Humble Beginning

Paul Buchheit, Gmail's first engineer, writes about the first steps in the evolution of Gmail.

I wrote the first version of Gmail in one day. It was not very impressive. All I did was stuff my own email into the Google Groups (Usenet) indexing engine. I sent it out to a few people for feedback, and they said that it was somewhat useful, but it would be better if it searched over their email instead of mine. That was version two. After I released that people started wanting the ability to respond to email as well. That was version three. That process went on for a couple of years inside of Google before we released to the world.

And even when it was released, Gmail stayed in a closed beta for more than a year. After almost four years since the release, Gmail constantly adds new features and it's still in beta ("There's no good reason in the world for Gmail to still have the beta tag. It was supposed to have gone away a long time ago," says Paul).

Paul Buchheit, who left Google and currently works for a startup with other ex-Googlers, thinks it's important to release applications in an incipient phase to get feedback from users.

So what's the right attitude? Humility. It doesn't matter how smart and successful and qualified you are, you simply don't know what you're doing. (...) What is the humble approach to product design? Pay attention. Notice which things are working and which aren't. Experiment and iterate. Question your assumptions. Remember that you are wrong about a lot of things. Watch for the signals. Lose your technical and design snobbery.

Gmail got a delete button after many months of requests from users, even if Gmail's philosophy was "archive, don't delete". Gmail will also add some functionality from folders to its labels, most likely drag and drop.

The key step is to build a product that's interesting enough to a attract an audience and learn from people who use the product. "The sooner you can start testing your ideas, the sooner you can start fixing them," explains Paul.

Designing Google's Logo

Wired has an article about the design of Google's logo and its iterations. "Ruth Kedar, the graphic designer who developed the now-famous logo, shows the iterations that led to the instantly recognizable primary colors and Catull typeface that define the Google brand. Kedar met Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page through a mutual friend nine years ago at Stanford University, where she was an assistant professor."

In the process, Ruth used a lot of symbols: from a pattern that suggests the infinite to interlocking rings that symbolize the power of search to transgress cultures, from a happy magnifying glass to sheer playfulness. "By taking out the magnifying glass, Kedar opens up the logo to signify that Google can become much more than just a search engine. By playing with the angles and colors of the letters, she tries to make clear that Google isn't a square corporation."

Ruth Kedar explains that she chose the Catull typeface because "Catull borrows elements from traditional writing instruments such as the quill and the chisel with a modern twist. Search, by nature, is an activity that requires we look into the past. Therefore Catull's historical ties seemed appropriate, as did the bridging between the old analog world and the new emerging digital era."

As you can see, the simple and cheerful Google logo hides a lot of interesting ideas and it's still relevant to the company, even if it's no longer just a search engine.

Before adopting a professional logo, Google used a logo created by Sergey Brin in GIMP. "Tinkering one day with a graphics program called GIMP, Sergey created a color rendering of the Google letters with an exclamation point at the end, mimicking Yahoo! He seemed quite proud of the new logo, which was composed of kindergarten-style block letters in primary colors. But it wasn't the look that meant the most to him. He was pleased that he had been able to teach himself how to use GIMP, free software that was tricky to employ," writes David A. Vise in The Google Story.

Google in 2000

What search engine did you use in 2000? It's very likely that the answer is not Google. Three months before Google became the default search provider for Yahoo, Google's search results looked slightly different than they look today. Google showed relevant categories from DMOZ, the snippets were much shorter, the "related pages" feature was called GoogleScout, "I'm Feeling Lucky" was added to every search results pages and you could choose the number of search results from a drop-down. At that time, Google didn't offer any specialized search engine, but it added at the bottom of the page a list of links to competitors (you probably used one of those search engines). The number of search results was much smaller because Google only indexed around 200 million web pages and Google was still looking for ways to monetize the search engine.

Google still hosts a search results page from April 2000, even if it's slightly modified because it was a part of an April Fool's Day prank called Mentalplex. Here's a slightly updated search results page from later that year.



The same year, Google introduced text ads, but they were rather primitive. "Google has recently started to include text-only banner ads on their search engine, but you may have not noticed the change because most searches currently don't include a banner ad along with the search results," reported tomalak.org in January 2000. Here's how the advertising system worked at that time:

"Google uses its Patent-Pending PageRank Technology and sophisticated query classification to create a Virtual Directory. In other words, Google categorizes the thousands of different search queries into the Internet's most popular and targeted areas. Advertisers simply select from a wide range of available categories most appropriate to their business. Google will match the appropriate ads to the category most relevant to the user's search."


The web could still be approximated by directories, collections of high-quality sites manually categorized by editors. In March 2000, Google integrated data from the Open Directory Project: "1.5 million entries, arranged in over 200,000 categories, selected and maintained by a volunteer corps of more than 22,000 editors." Larry Page concluded that "the addition of Netscape's Open Directory Project creates the most comprehensive and robust search resource for finding information and browsing the Web. We've combined the best aspects of search and directories to create an enhanced tool for easy access to information contained on the Web."

Google's traffic started to grow at an alarming rate. "Google ended 1999 averaging about 7 million searches each day, a roughly 70,000% increase over the 10,000 searches per day that were performed on the Google site in December 1998! This explosive growth reflects the total number of searches performed by users on www.google.com and on our corporate partner sites. As of the middle of January, we are averaging more than 10 million searches each day," reported Sergey Brin and Larry Page in the company's newsletter. Google wasn't satisfied and launched an affiliate program that enticed webmasters to add a Google search box to their sites. "By signing up for our affiliate program (...) you'll be able to place a Google search box on your site and begin receiving 3 cents for each search you send our way." At the end of 2000, Google handled more than 100 million search queries a day.

2000 was also the year when Matt Cutts joined Google. "When I joined in 2000, Google was a scrappy underdog search engine. Back then, Altavista was vastly more popular and reported 50 million searches a day. Google was popular among savvy webmasters and at many universities, and usage was growing quickly by word-of-mouth, but the smart folks at Google were eager for the company to be more well-known."

An example of positive feedback from 2000 (Usenet, via Google Groups):

"Try www.google.com. I've been most impressed with its ability to return good, relevant hits. Another big bonus with Google is that the site is almost completely clear of bandwidth-hogging graphics and advertising. The web site has to be the fastest I've ever seen."

2000 is the year that made Google a successful search engine, even if many people wondered what's the revenue strategy. "The company's adamant refusal to use banner or other graphical ads eliminates what is the most lucrative income stream for rival search engines. Although Google does have other revenue sources, such as licensing and text-based advertisements, the privately held company's business remains limited compared with its competitors," concluded Business Week in December 2000. "Now comes Google's big test. Can it keep forswearing pay-for-placement deals that allow commercial sites to buy high rankings in searches? Yahoo has begun cutting these deals in droves, matching lesser competitor LookSmart. But Brin says he isn't worried: When somebody searches for 'cancer,' should you put up the site that paid you or the site that has better information? Brin is betting better information will win the day. "

I'm Feeling Lucky

Google's homepage in 1998

The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button is one of the very few things that stand out on Google's minimalistic homepage. It automatically takes you to the first search result and it's helpful for navigational queries, when there's a single good result (e.g.: [Yahoo Mail], [download Opera]). The option was included in a slightly altered manner in Google Toolbar and Firefox: browse by name instead of typing URLs in the address bar.

I'm Feeling Lucky:
http://google.com/search?btnI=1&q=yahoo+mail

Browse by Name:
http://google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=mail
http://google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=yahoo+mail

Marketplace found more about "I'm Feeling Lucky" and its meaning.

"The reason it's called 'I'm Feeling Lucky,' is of course that's a pretty damn ambitious goal. I mean to get the exact right one thing without even giving you a list of choices, and so you have to feel a little bit lucky if you're going to try that with one go," tried to explain Sergey Brin.

"You know Larry and Sergey had the view, and I certainly share it, that it's possible just to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. And you know what I think is really delightful about Google and about the "I'm Feeling Lucky," is that they remind you that the people here have personality and that they have interests and that there is real people," said Marissa Mayer.

Even if only 1% from Google's searches bypass the search results page and go straight to the top result, Google will keep the strange button on the homepage as it has become a part of its brand. Probably the last time someone told you to click the button was to show you a Google Bomb: Go to Google, type in "miserable failure" and then press the "I'm feeling lucky" button (don't try, it won't work anymore). Or maybe you've seen the button in Picasa or iGoogle.

Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror thinks that the button is Google's number one UI mistake: "I understand this was a clever little joke in the early days of Google-- hey, look at us, we're a search engine that actually works! -- but is it really necessary to carry this clever little joke forward ten years and display it on the monitors of millions of web users every day? We get it already. Google is awesomely effective."

"I'm Feeling Lucky" boxers (limited edition)

Google will remove the button when you won't have to feel lucky to get the best results every time and when the list of links will be replaced with an actual answer.

{ via Valleywag }

Finding Related Web Pages

Google is the only major search engine that offers a "similar pages" feature, but not too many people use it. Launched in September 1999 as GoogleScout (scout=explore, investigate), the feature shows around 30 web pages related to a search result.

For example, to find sites related to Google Reader, you can click on the "similar pages" link placed after the snippet and you'll discover other feed readers, Google Reader's blog, information about feeds, blog platforms.

The related pages are generated by analyzing the link structure of the web. A patent from 2000 explains how this feature works: "a first set of hyperlinked documents that have a forward link to the selected hyperlinked document is provided. Additionally, a second set of hyperlinked documents that are pointed to by the forward links in the hyperlinked documents in the first set is provided. A value is assigned to each forward link in each of the hyperlinked documents in the first set, with the value being reduced for a forward link if there are multiple hyperlinked documents from the same host as the hyperlinked document that includes the forward link. A score is generated for each hyperlinked document in the second set according to the values of the forward links pointing to the hyperlinked document. Accordingly, a list of related hyperlinked documents is generated from the second set according to the score of the hyperlinked documents."

Basically, you're expecting that many sites that link to Google Reader will also link to its competitors and to related information. This is very similar to Amazon's recommendations: "customers who bought this item also bought".

How to use this features?

• find the competitors of a company (e.g.: DaimlerChrysler)
• find similar music (e.g.: Regina Spektor)
• you like a site and want to find other sites like it (digg)
• explore a domain (like machine learning)
• refine the search results (search for bass and find the related pages for the first result about the fish)

Unfortunately, Google's implementation has a major flaw: because many pages link to popular sites like Blogger, Flickr, StatCounter, you'll sometimes find these sites in the list of related links even if they're completely unrelated. Gred Linden calls this "the Harry Potter problem", when talking about Amazon's recommendation system. "The first version of similarities was quite popular. But it had a problem, the Harry Potter problem. Oh, yes, Harry Potter. Harry Potter is a runaway bestseller. Kids buy it. Adults buy it. Everyone buys it. So, take a book, any book. If you look at all the customers who bought that book, then look at what other books they bought, rest assured, most of them have bought Harry Potter."

So even if GoogleScout doesn't work well all the time, it's a great tool for research and serependitious discoveries (add a bookmarklet to your browser to use this feature for any site you visit). Another way to find related pages is to search for a site in Google Directory and to click on its category. Similicio.us uses the bookmarks from del.icio.us to complete this sentence: "people who bookmarked this site also bookmarked...", while the untrustworthy Alexa fills in the blanks for "people who visit this site also visit...". Google also uses similar ideas to provide recommendations based on your search history.

Google's Evolution as Seen on Wikipedia

Wikipedia's page for Google changed a lot as Google morphed from a search engine to an Internet company. The Wayback Machine is a good way to see how a web page evolved over time and it's easier to browse than Wikipedia's own history service. I only included the introduction of each version of the article and Google's homepage from the same period.

December 2003



Google is an Internet search engine that not only indexes the World Wide Web, but also caches the web pages themselves. It also indexes pictures on the web, Usenet newsgroups and news sites. As of 2003, it was the most popular search engine, handling upwards of 80% of all internet searches through its website and clients like Yahoo! and AOL.


July 2004



Google is the most popular search engine on the World Wide Web. Through its website and client websites, such as AOL, Google receives roughly 200 million search requests per day. Google has its headquarters (called the "Googleplex") in Mountain View, California, USA.

In addition to web pages, Google also provides services for searching images, Usenet newsgroups, news sites, and items for sale online. As of June 2004, Google contained 4.28 billion web pages, 880 million images and 845 million Usenet messages in its index; a total of 6 billion items. It also caches much of the content that it indexes.


December 2004



Google is a U.S.-based search engine owned by Google Inc. whose mission "is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." The largest search engine on the web, Google receives over 200 million queries each day through its various services.

In addition to its tool for searching webpages, Google also provides services for searching images, Usenet newsgroups, news websites, and items for sale online. As of November 2004, Google has indexed 8.05 billion webpages, 880 million images, and 845 million Usenet messages — in total, over 9.5 billion items. It also caches much of the content that it indexes. Some of the other programs that operate under Google control include Blogger, Picasa, Keyhole, Froogle, and Google Desktop Search.


March 2005



Google, Inc. is a U.S.-based corporation, established in 1998, that manages the Google search engine. Google is headquartered at the "Googleplex" in Mountain View, California, and employs over 3,000 workers. Google's CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt, formerly CEO of Novell, took over when co-founder Larry Page stepped down.


March 2006



Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) is a U.S. public corporation, first incorporated as a privately held corporation in September, 1998, that designs and manages the Internet Google search engine. The company employs approximately 5,700 employees and is based in Mountain View, California. Eric Schmidt, formerly chief executive officer of Novell, was named Google's CEO when co-founder Larry Page stepped down.

The name "Google" is a play on the word "googol," which refers to the number represented by 1 followed by one hundred zeros. As a further play on this, Google's headquarters, located in California, are referred to as "the Googleplex" — a googolplex being 1 followed by a googol of zeros, and the HQ being a complex of buildings (cf. multiplex, cineplex, etc).

Google's services are run on several server farms, each consisting of many thousand low-cost commodity computers running stripped-down versions of Linux. While the company does not provide detailed information about its hardware, it was estimated in 2005 that they were using more than 100,000 Linux machines. See Google platform for more details on their technology.


July 2006



Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG and LSE: GGEA) is an American multinational software corporation, first incorporated as a privately held corporation in September, 1998, that specializes in search engine, information retrieval technology and online advertising. With a market capitalization of US$118.32 billion as of June 2006, Google is the largest internet search company in the world, almost twice as large as rival Yahoo! The company employs approximately 6,800 employees and is based in Mountain View, California. Eric Schmidt, formerly chief executive officer of Novell, was named Google's CEO when co-founder Larry Page stepped down.

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol," which refers to 10^100 (a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros). Google has become well known for its corporate culture and innovative, clean products, and has a major impact on online culture. The verb "to google" has come to mean "to perform a Web search", usually with the Google search engine.

Google's services are run on several server farms, which, in 2004, consisted of over 30 clusters of up to 2,000 PCs per cluster. Each cluster contains one petabyte of data with sustained transfer rates of 2 Gbps. Combined, over four billion web pages, averaging 10 Kb each, have been fully indexed.


November 2006



Google, Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG and LSE: GGEA) is an American public corporation and search engine, first incorporated as a privately held company on 7 September 1998. The company had 9,378 full-time employees as of September 30, 2006 and is based in Mountain View, California. Eric Schmidt, former chief executive officer of Novell, was named Google's CEO when co-founder Larry Page stepped down.

The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol," which refers to 10^100 (a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros). Google has had a major impact on online culture. The verb "google" was recently added to both the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."

Google's services are run on several server farms, each consisting of thousands of low-cost commodity computers running stripped-down versions of Linux. While the company does not provide detailed information about its hardware, a 2006 estimate consisted of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world (See Google platform for more details on their technology). According to the Nielsen cabinet, Google is the most used search engine on the web with a 54% market share, ahead of Yahoo! (23%) and MSN (13%). However, independent estimates from popular sites indicate that more than 80% of search referrals come from Google, with Yahoo! a distant second and MSN occupying barely 5%. The Google search engine receives about a billion search requests per day.


June 2007



Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG and LSE: GGEA) is an American public corporation, specializing in Internet searching and online advertising. The company is based in Mountain View, California, and has 12,238 full-time employees (as of March 31, 2007). Google's mission statement is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Google's corporate philosophy includes statements such as, "You can make money without doing evil," and, "Work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun," illustrating a somewhat relaxed corporate culture.

Google was co-founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University, and the company was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 7, 1998. Google's initial public offering took place on August 19, 2004, raising USD1.67 billion, making it worth $23 billion. Through a series of new product developments, acquisitions and partnerships, the company has expanded its initial search and advertising business into other areas, including web-based email, online mapping, office productivity, and video sharing, among others.

Like most large corporations, Google's businesses have drawn some controversy, such as copyright disputes in its book search project, or censorship by Google of search results as it works with countries such as France, Germany, and China -- each of whom have laws requiring the company hide information from Google users in their country. Additionally, in the post September 11 era, several governments and militaries have raised concerns about the national security risks posed by vivid geographic details provided by Google Earth's satellite imaging. However, it should be noted that all of the images and details visible in Google Earth are available through other public, free sources; Google Earth does, however, make it easier to access.

Paul Buchheit, the Man Behind Gmail

Creative Commons-licensed by jm3

"I think, in general, people are uncomfortable with things that are different. Even now when I talk about adding new features to Gmail, if it isn't just a small variation or rearranging what's already there, people don't like it. People have a narrow concept of what's possible, and we're limited more by our own ideas about what's possible than what really is possible. So they just get uncomfortable, and they kind of tend to attack it for whatever reason."

(Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail)

Paul Buchheit is the man behind Gmail, the first and the most successful AJAX web application from Google.

On April 1, 2004, we rolled out the first release of Gmail. It immediately became known for giving away 1000 MB of storage, while the others only offered 4 MB, as they had for many years. We didn't do that just for the attention (although we certainly got our share). It's just part of our philosophy. We always want to do as much as we can for our users, and so if we can make something free, we will.

But storage was only the most obvious difference, and our other improvements were just as important. Gmail included a quick and accurate search. It introduced powerful new concepts to organize email, such as the conversation view (so now I can finally see all those replies at once). It provided a fast and dynamic interface from web browsers everywhere, popularizing the techniques that have since become known as AJAX.

This interface included many important features not commonly found on the web at that time, such as email address auto-completion, a slick spell-checker, keyboard shortcuts, and pages that update instantly. It included a smart spam filter to get rid of junk mail. Finally, we made an important new promise: you can keep your Gmail address and all of your email, even if you someday decide that Gmail is not for you. Cell phone owners already have the right to keep their old phone number when switching to a new provider, and you should have that same freedom with email. To ensure this freedom, Gmail provides, for free, both email forwarding and POP download of all your mail. Many services are now beginning to include other Gmail innovations; we hope that some day they will also be willing to include this one.

But Gmail managed to make other competing email services improve.

Mr. Buchheit said he started working on Gmail after observing that other email programs were getting worse, not better. Microsoft's Mr. Doerr said that at his company, Gmail was a thunderbolt. "You guys woke us up," he told Mr. Buchheit. Yahoo's Mr. Diamond, then at a startup with its own hot, new email program, [OddPost, now known as Yahoo Mail Beta] said Gmail was the final impetus that Yahoo needed to buy his company.

Mr. Buchheit responded with a victory lap. "We were trying to make the email experience better for our users," he said. "We ended up making it better for yours, too."

"Paul was one of the first engineers at Google. Among other things, he came up with the idea for PigeonRank. Oh yeah, and Gmail, which he largely built himself in the middle of the night. Paul liked to get to the office after noon or even at dinnertime, then work on into the next morning," recalls an ex-Googler. He also wrote the original prototype of Google AdSense and came up with Google's mantra: "Don't be evil". He joined Google in 1999, but he left the company last year because his life there became "too predictable, and too typical." But you can find him at his blog where he still talks a lot about Google.

Google's Custom Built Servers

Jeff Atwood visited the Computer History Museum from Mountain View, California. Among other impressive things, he saw one of Google's first production servers.

"Instead of buying whatever pre-built rack-mount servers Dell, Compaq, and IBM were selling at the time, Google opted to hand-build their server infrastructure themselves. The sagging motherboards and hard drives are literally propped in place on handmade plywood platforms. The power switches are crudely mounted in front, the network cables draped along each side. The poorly routed power connectors snake their way back to generic PC power supplies in the rear. (...)

Even today, Google is serious about exerting total control over the servers in their now-massive server farms. They build their own high-efficiency power supplies, and conduct fascinating, public research on disk failure. Current estimates put Google's server farm at around 450,000 machines - and they're still custom built, commodity-class x86 PCs, just like they were in 1999."

Jeff thinks it's a good idea to follow Google's model and to build your own PC, by using your favorite components. He even offers some suggestions.

Google Toolbar's Voting Buttons

In December 2001, when there was no Digg or StumbleUpon, Google Toolbar launched a beta version:

A new version of the Google toolbar now in beta testing sports a new look -- happy and sad faces that let toolbar users rate web pages. (...)

Google says that excessive clicks are watched for. Google also assures that it has mechanisms in place to ensure good sites don't get penalized by competitors voting against them.

Here's how Google describes the feature: "Use these buttons to vote for or against a page or search result. Click the happy or unhappy face to tell Google that you like or dislike a particular page. You can also use these buttons to report especially good or bad results after you do a search with Google."

Matt Cutts explained at that time: "Right now it's just an experiment. Worst case, it's an easy way for people to report spam that we can handle automatically. We might see if we can improve our search with this data."

In 2003, when Google Toolbar 2 was launched, Google was still undecided: "This feature is currently in test mode, so you will not notice any immediate effects based on your action, other than experiencing a warm sense of satisfaction from having shared your feelings with people who really do care."

The tests must have been positive since the feature was included in the next version too. It's interesting to note that the mysterious feature continous to be available in the Internet Explorer version of Google Toolbar (Settings > Options > More > Voting), but it hasn't been included in the Firefox extension.


This small feature may have been responsible for detecting spam sites or for changing page rankings, but Google could resurrect it and make it a part of Google Personalized Search. They already show interesting pages related to your interests, these voting buttons could refine Google's data and improve the personalized search results.

How Google Sees Itself

Press releases are boring, but the about section from the end (or the boilerplate) could tell you a lot about a company. Here are some excerpts from Google's press releases over the years.

1999:

-"Google is dedicated to providing the best search experience on the web. Google has its own search destination site at http://google.com. Google also offers co-branded solutions for information content providers. Google was founded in September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, building on three years of research as computer science Ph.D. candidates at Stanford University. Traffic has been growing at a rate of 50% per month since Google's inception, fueled only by word of mouth."

1999-2000:

-"Google was founded in 1998 by Stanford University Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin to create a new generation of powerful, scalable search engine products to improve the user experience of searching the web. Based on three years of advanced research in computer science, Google is dedicated to providing the best user search experience by delivering a powerful, yet simple-to-use format for finding the most relevant answers to search queries."

2000:

-"Google exists to provide the world's best Internet search experience. Google accomplishes this for millions of users daily by delivering a powerful, fast, and easy way to find the most relevant information available. Google's technological innovations have powered the company to numerous awards, including a 2000 Webby and People's Voice Award For Best Technical Achievement; Best Search Engine on the Internet from Yahoo! Internet Life; Top Ten Best Cybertech of 1999 by TIME magazine; Technical Excellence Award from PC Magazine; and Best Search Engine by The Net."

2001-2002:

-"With the largest index of websites available on the World Wide Web and the industry's most advanced search technology, Google Inc. delivers the fastest and easiest way to find relevant information on the Internet. (...) A growing number of companies worldwide, including Yahoo! and its international properties, Sony Corporation and its global affiliates, Netscape, and Cisco Systems, rely on Google to power search on their websites."

(at some point in) 2004:

-"Google is a global technology leader focused on improving the way people connect with information. Google's innovations in web search and advertising have made its website a top Internet destination and its brand one of the most recognized in the world. Google maintains the world's largest online index of websites and other content, and Google makes this information freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Google's automated search technology helps people obtain nearly instant access to relevant information from its vast online index."

2003-now:

-"Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia."

2006 (April Fool's Day edition):

-"Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every second of every minute of every hour of every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. wannabes Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets and a very large number of minor ones. Google's targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for those users who haven't tuned out of online commerce altogether. Most Google lava lamps and bean bag chairs are located in Silicon Valley, though numerous such lamps and chairs can also be found in offices throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia."

Trying to provide the best search engine and to improve the way people connect with information, Google became a great brand and a top web property thanks to the word of the mouth, the important awards received and the collaboration with Yahoo, Netscape and other companies. Independent of platform, browser or language, Google conquered the world by being fast, easy to use and friendly.

Here are some definitions for Google from 1999:

Larry Page: "Google fills a real void in the Internet precisely because we have a manic passion for pure, unadulterated search."

Sergey Brin: "Google strives to get Internet users to the information they want as quickly and efficiently as possible, and that's all we do. We've engendered such strong loyalty because Google provides the purest and most powerful search experience on the web."

Google's Discontinued Services

Google launched a lot of services over the time. Some were successful, others were decent, but very few were discontinued. Here's a list.

1. Google Keyboard Shortcuts (2002) - use your keyboard to navigate between search results.

2. Google Voice Search (2002) - search Google with a telephone call. This way you didn't have to type queries, as Google used voice recognition.

3. Google Viewer (2002) - view Google results as a slide show. Google Toolbar has this feature, but it doesn't go to the next result automatically.

4. Google Webquotes (2002) - read comments about a web page.

5. Google Compute (2002) - an add-on for Google Toolbar that allowed you to use your computer's resources to help research projects (the program worked only when your computer was idle). "When you enable Google Compute, your computer will download a small piece of a large research project and perform calculations on it that will then be included with the calculations performed by thousands of other computers doing the same thing. This process is known as distributed computing."

6. Google Answers (2002) - get answers from researchers for a fee. The product was discontinued in November this year.

7. Google Search API (2002) - a SOAP API that allowed developers to integrate Google's search results into their applications. The product is now deprecated.

8. Google Deskbar (2003) - search Google from your desktop and see search results in a mini-viewer. The product has been integrated into Google Desktop.

9. Google X (2005) - a Mac-like interface for Google. The page has been live only for a day and it has been removed to prevent a suit from Apple.

10. Google Video (initial version) - search the content of television shows. Google recorded the TV programs and allowed people to search closed captions and see images from the show. You couldn't play videos.

As you can see, some products were replaced by more powerful ones, others were unsuccessful, had copyright problems or technical difficulties. It's interesting to note that most discontinued products were launched in 2002.

The Lost Google Tapes

This is a fascinating story. John F. Ince made an interview in January 2000 with Larry Page and Sergey Brin for the Upside magazine. Unfortunately, the editor didn't like the optimistic tone about a company with "no business model" and the interview has been diluted into a talk about search engines. Now the interview will be available for the first time, after seven years, on podventurezone.com, starting on December 11.

Here's a little bit more about the story and some highlights from the interview:
Chronicle podcast.

Google Buys Its First Office

Google has bought "the Silicon Valley home where co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented a garage eight years ago" and started the company, reports AP. They'll pay an undisclosed amount to Susan Wojcicki, who is now Google's Vice President of Product Management.

Google talks about its history in a hilarious way: "In September 1998, Google Inc. opened its door in Menlo Park, California. The door came with a remote control, as it was attached to the garage of a friend who sublet space to the new corporation's staff of three. The office offered several big advantages, including a washer and dryer and a hot tub. It also provided a parking space for the first employee hired by the new company: Craig Silverstein, now Google's director of technology."

The house is barely visible in Google Maps and it's already a touristic attraction. "We plan to preserve the property as a part of our living legacy," said Google spokesman Jon Murchinson.

{ Image from thirdsquare.com: Sergey Brin and Larry Page in their office-garage (1998).}

8 Years of Google

Google wanted to celebrate their September anniversary today with a special logo. From 1998, the company has evolved a lot. I've compiled some excerpts from the news about Google, published in September, to show a glimpse from its evolution. The last snippet is from Google Groups.

"As will undoubtedly make the rounds everywhere in the blogosphere today, Google has just launched Google Blog Search. Google's perhaps the single company most identitied with search, so their entrance into the blog search space is a big milestone even though the idea of blog search has been around for years." (September 2005)

"Today, Google launched a number of significant upgrades to Google Local, Google's local search service. These enhancements and new features are a result of Google's continuing effort to develop Google Local and make local information even more accessible and useful. The new improvements include (...) a new, cleaner design [with] maps on results pages displaying the location of businesses in the search results" (September 2004)

"Google, one of the most aggressive staff recruiters in Silicon Valley, is putting on a programming contest worth up to $10,000 and a possible career at the search company." (September 2003)

"Google News (...) has had a major facelift. The service is still in beta and still free. But now it is linked prominently from Google's top page, which means that millions of people will try it. Google News is an automated aggregator. In its earlier incarnation, Google spidered some 150 news sites, updating once an hour, and determined which stories were the most covered; it built a page with summaries and links, all generated without benefit of a human editor. Now Google spiders 4,000 news sites and updates every 15 minutes. The resulting news page is refreshingly free of blinking ads and pop-unders, as all of Google has been since its inception." (September 2002)

"In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, popular news Web sites such as CNN.com and ABCNEWS.com were overwhelmed with a deluge of people grasping for the latest information. For many, the sites were inaccessible. Into the breach stepped Google Inc., the search engine company. It had made copies of the news pages before the crush and offered them up on its site." (September 2001)

"Using a new search algorithm that Google launched Friday, users can input numbers directly into their cellular phones, and the Google algorithm intelligently figures out what words they represent." (September 2000)

"Suppose you had a search engine that could steer straight through the oceans of inanities on the Net. The Web's meandering masses would soon make a beeline for it, clamoring for their daily fix of relevant search results. It would be manna for the mind, and everyone would love it. But would you have a business?" (September 1999)

"I've used it several times over the last few months. I think right now it's still one of those things that only people "in the know" use, although it's beginning to get some press now. It really reminds me of that other Stanford offshoot....Yahoo.... It runs on Linux and you actually find what you're looking for on the Net with it. Damn, I wish I had some spare money floating about to invest in it once it becomes a company." (September 1998)

Blogger Turns Seven

Seven years ago, on August 23, 1999, Pyra Labs gave birth to Blogger, a publishing system that will redefine the web. Back then, Evan Williams (co-founder of Pyra Labs, now CEO at Odeo), was very happy to announce the news:

"We just launched a cool new tool at Pyra. It's called Blogger. It's an automated weblog publishing tool. Unlike Pitas, which, don't get me wrong, is cool, Blogger FTP's your updated weblog page to your own server after each post. This means you can have everything "under the same roof," as Jack put it the other day. You retain complete control. In fact, no one even has to know you're using Blogger. It just makes your life simplier. Check it out. (Coming soon: Automated XML channel creation.)"


In February 2003, Google buys Blogger and rewrites the platform, adding new features and removing the premium ad-free service. Now Blogger is in the middle of a new upgrade.

Meanwhile, both co-founders leave Pyra Labs (Meg Hourihan in 2001, Evan Williams in 2004), and now Jason Goldman leaves Google too. It's really interesting to read their motivations.

"For me, it's a little under 20% of this life on Earth. And it's the time when I find myself thinking a lot about a particular question: What should I do next?

I'm not sure what the answer to that question is, but I've decided it's something different than I do now. And I need some perspective to answer it. So, I've to move on. I.e.: As of this Friday, I will no longer be employed by Google.

Yes, I'm leaving my baby (or is it an adolescent by now?), in the hands of an awesome team we've compiled over the last few years. And I'm taking some time off to think.

I've always dreamed of creating something that lived on, while letting me go create something new, creating things having always been my passion. During the bad times, though I considered it, I couldn't leave because Blogger wouldn't live on. During the good, I just wasn't ready. Now, I'm ready. And, while it's not easy, it's incredibly fulfilling."

Jason Goldman describes the best the power of a such a simple way of expression:

"I struggle with excessive skepticism and in many ways would be a natural blog-hater were it not for the fact that, to me, it's undeniably awesome that people can so easily put their profound, profane, revolutionary and ridiculous thoughts online. To me, this is so obviously the fullest expression of why the web is the most important invention of our lives."

Google Pages You've Never Seen (Part two)

Explore Google World from 2003."Work is hard and you need a break. A sun-soaked vacation is just the ticket, but where to begin? With Google there's a world of helpful, time-saving features right at your fingertips."

How to build a better query - useful tips.

Valentine's Day 2001
A Java applet that shows a heart and writes "I love you" in more languages. That was before designing logos for holidays and special events.

20 years of Usenet - including first mentions of Microsoft, Sun, Cisco, Madonna, Britney Spears, Mac OSX and Google.

Statistics about html elements' usage. An average web page uses 19 tags.

In 2003 Google searched 3 billion documents. Now Google has more than 24 billion documents in the index. Also see why size isn't important.

Google ranks #1 in NPD search & portal scorecard measuring loyalty and satisfaction (in 2000).

Google Voice Search - search on Google by voice with a simple telephone call.

Google Keyboard Shortcuts - navigate search results without using your mouse.

Google Compute - put your computer to work advancing scientific knowledge when it's not helping you.

Site-flavored search - Enter the URL of a site, and Google will try to infer a profile for the site based on its content.

AdSense for Paper - Google has placed targeted ads in two magazines on behalf of AdWords advertisers.

Dilbert and the Google Doodle. The first and last Dilbert cartoon on Google.

Britney Spears spelling corrections. The data shows some of the misspellings detected by Google's spelling correction system for the query [ britney spears ], and how many different users spelled her name that way. The most common misspelling is "brittany spears".

Google searches related to 9/11. Also Google's condolences.

Google can help your business make more money: promo for AdSense, AdWords and Froogle.

AdWords 2004 - a presentation about AdWords with nice greyscale pictures from Googleplex.

Librarian Center - a newsletter with search tips for librarians.

This page used to be displayed when searching for "jew" because the first results were anti-jew sites and people were disturbed.

Looking for Picasa? What about Urchin?

Also:
Google pages you've never seen (part one)

Credits for some of the links: Neil Patel and Cristian Mezei.

The Man Behind Google's Logos

Dennis Hwang, the man behind the famous Google logos created for special occasions, talks to CNN.

"It's always a fun kind of challenge to incorporate the logo into the design."

Some logos are just funny (like the New Years' logos), others have a message (like the logo for the Earth Day), while a small part of them are simply brilliant (Braille logo). Dennis Hwang's creative logos have been expressing Google's playful spirit. For Piet Mondrian's birthday, Hwang transformed the Google logo to emulate the artist's signature style of using colorful blocks. For Claude Monet's birthday, the logo has been turned into a dreamy watercolor, complete with floating lily pads.

While he sometimes made people happy (like when he made a logo for National Library Day), some webmasters were unhappy to see their site down because of the huge traffic generated by Google. If you click on the special logo, you'll be sent to the search results for a query related to that event, like "national library day". The first result for that query, that usually had 1000-2000 visitors a day, suddenly has a couple of millions curios visitors.

"It didn't cause any server problems or anything. It just took me a while to track down what was happening. You sort of come in, you turn on your server and look at your stats and they're wildly inflated, so you then have to do some detective work," says a site owner.

Dennis Hwang's favorite logos are those celebrating the birthdays of Michelangelo, Picasso, and Van Gogh.

Here's the complete list of logos.

Related:
If a logo changes every day, is it still a logo?
Google removes Joan Miró doodle
Another interview with Dennis

Google Was Initially An Annotation System

Here are some great quotes from 2003 in which Larry Page explains a little about his original intentions, why it was important to become a profitable business and how Google made hardware acquisitions. If you look back, it seems difficult to believe that Google had a hard time finding investors.

"Google has been profitable since the first quarter of 2001. Why did we make becoming profitable such a priority? It's good that we did, because we might well be gone if we hadn't. The real reason is that we became profitable in the first quarter of 2001 because Sergey Brin made it a priority. You see, Sergey would try to go out on dates. He would call up women. And to impress them he would say, 'I'm the president of a money-losing dot-com.' But in Palo Alto in 2000, a huge number of people were presidents of money-losing dot-coms. And so they would not call him back. And he thought, 'If only I were president of a money-making dot-com, things would be very different...'"

"It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web - build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank.

"Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."

"Our original hardware acquisition strategy was non-standard. We would go out and wait on the loading dock and beg for computers. When new computers arrived at Stanford we would go up to the people taking delivery and say, 'Surely you don't need all ten of these computers. Surely you can give us one. We have a really interesting research project..'"

Quotes from Semi-Daily Journal (ignore the spam).