Happy birthday, Romania

From John Battelle's blog (July 08, 2005):

It's Friday, so I can tell you this random search story. In the post below about Paul, I made an offhand remark about social networks being useful for one thing, getting laid. I then noticed that Paul was, in fact, wearing a lei in his Yahoo 360 picture. I decided to note the joke in an updated post. But I was not sure how to spell "lei" and furthermore, how to turn it into a verb (I settled on "lei'd"). In any case, to check the spelling of "lei" I plugged it into my Firefox Google toolbar. It confirmed the spelling, but also did a currency conversion for me, which is a new feature at Google. Turns out, the lei is unit of Romanian currency (though yahoo says it's a "leu").

But only Google would do a conversion that looks like this:

Explanation: 1 December is Romania's National Day.

Google Office

Inside Google Office is a friendly atmosphere. Googleplex shines with intelligence and bright colors.

Google Space

Google has taken its first foray into the physical world with the launch of an Internet cafe-style computing booth in London's Heathrow Airport.

The temporary installation, termed Google Space, consists of ten Samsung laptops in the public lounge of Terminal One at London's main airport.

The stand, launched on Tueday morning, will be staffed by at least two Google employees from 0700 to 1900 every day for the duration of the trial, which will run until 19 December. Google staff will be flown in from around the world to man the station.

Google Space offers passengers free access to applications such as Google Earth, Google Mail and Picasa.

Xooglers

Xooglers is a gathering spot for ex-Googlers to reminisce and comment on the latest developments in search. It’s a blog that Doug Edwards and Ron Garret started to reminisce about his experiences at Google.

Ron sez:

My first day at Google went like this:

5:30 AM, wake up.
6:00 AM drive to Burbank airport.
6:30 AM stand in line at the Southwest airlines gate to get one of those now defunct plastic boarding passes
7:30 AM board the plane
9:00 AM or so land in San Jose
9:30 AM get the rental car
10:00 roll up to the Googleplex

It was a murderous commute. Four hours, which I eventually whittled down to three after a year of optimizing. I went through various permutations of cabs, rental cars, having my wife drive me to and from the airport (that didn't go over well at all) before I finally settled into something that vaguely resembled a routine. I ultimately ended up driving two different cars back and forth between LA and San Jose, and on a couple of occasions I did my commute in a Cessna 182RG (I'm a pilot) which was just too cool for words.

More from Day One.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt: The 70 percent solution

With his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and research stints at Bell Labs and Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center, he had a solid reputation among geeks, cemented by his championing of the Java programming language as Sun Microsystems' chief technology officer. And he faced his first real management test as CEO of Novell, the troubled software maker that has fought a long, difficult war with Microsoft.

These days Schmidt is on a stellar winning streak. How does he do it? One rule was handed to him by Brin and Page when he walked in the door: Don't be evil.

The other one is a formula he uses to stay on track while innovating: Spend 70 percent of your time on the core business, 20 percent on related projects, and 10 percent on unrelated new businesses. Business 2.0's John Battelle talked to Schmidt to find out how he and his colleagues live by those rules.

How has "Don't be evil" helped Google?

When I showed up, I said, "You've got to be kidding." Then 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.

Does Google have some kind of grand strategic plan for the new products it creates?

Virtually everything new seems to come from the 20 percent of their time engineers here are expected to spend on side projects. They certainly don't come out of the management team.

What do you do with your 20 percent time?

Well, 20 percent time applies to the technical staff. It does not apply to sales or management. Here's how it works for management: We spend 70 percent of our time on core search and ads. We spend 20 percent on adjacent businesses, ones related to the core businesses in some interesting way. Examples of that would be Google News, Google Earth and Google Local. And then 10 percent of our time should be on things that are truly new. An example there would be the Wi-Fi initiative.

Who's afraid of Google

It seems no one is safe: Google is doing Wi-Fi; Google is searching inside books; Google has a plan for ecommerce.

Of course, Google has always wanted to be more than a search engine. Even in the early days, its ultimate goal was extravagant: to organize the world's information. High-minded as that sounds, Google's ever-expanding agenda has put it on a collision course with nearly every company in the information technology industry: Amazon.com, Comcast, eBay, Yahoo!, even Microsoft.

VIDEO
Who's threatened: Comcast and other cable providers, Yahoo!, TV networks that still shun the Net
Reality check: Google Video is up and running. The question is, How much content can it attract - or pay for - to fill the database. Watch for a strategic acquisition, even something big. TiVo?

CLASSIFIEDS
Who's threatened: craigslist, eBay, Monster, Tribe.net
Reality check: This may be an extension of Froogle rather than a stand-alone product. But it could expand to everything from travel to eBay-like offerings.


TELECOM
Who's threatened: Comcast, SBC, Verizon, Vonage, what's left of AOL
Signs of panic: Surprisingly few so far, partially because Google says it has no plans to offer Wi-Fi beyond San Francisco. Still, Comcast coined the word Comcastic - is that its answer to Googlicious?
Reality check: Something's clearly afoot, and it could be big. With great power comes great regulation - so Google recently opened a DC lobbying shop to combat "centralized control by network operators."

OPERATING SYSTEMS
If anyone can fulfill the dream of turning the Internet into the operating system, it's Google. If the company chooses to develop an OS, the move will cement Google's other initiatives into a powerful whole.
Who's threatened: Apple, Microsoft
Reality check: The migration of applications from PCs to the Net is already happening - and it's key to Google's future. But the likelihood of a Google OS depends on what Microsoft accomplishes with its new OS, Vista.

PRINT
What if a search engine trolled not just every page on the Web, but every page in every book? Amazon.com tried it first, then Google said it would "make the full text of all the world's books searchable by anyone."
Who's threatened: Amazon, Microsoft, book publishers
Reality check: Making every book searchable sends a clear signal that Google has the brawn to organize the world's information. But a vicious backlash could drown out that message.

PRODUCTIVITY PROGRAMS
Google joined with Sun Microsystems in October to jointly promote and distribute apps like the Google Toolbar and Sun's free OpenOffice software. Wider distribution of the toolbar, Google's most potent Trojan horse, gives the search engine access to a world of desktops.
Who's threatened: Apple, Corel, Microsoft
Reality check: It may be a fiendishly clever way to attack one of Microsoft's highest-margin products, but this tactic can't be a top priority. Google Toolbar will thrive without Sun.

From: Wired.com

Google to digitize rare documents from around the world

Google has pledged to donate $3 million to the U.S. Library of Congress. They are going to help setup a system in place for creating digital copies of rare documents from around the world. This is just the latest step being taken by the search engine giant to expand the scope of their Google Book Search initiative earlier called Google Print.

With this announcement, Google becomes the first tech company to back the World Digital Library, a concept that began to take shape about five months ago. The program is loosely based on a similar plan called Library of Congress’ American Memory project, which was launched some 11 years ago.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said that this investment required little decision making as it goes on to help them achieve their goals of making the entire information available in the world available for search on the internet. Brin said during a Monday interview: "This is a philanthropic initiative for us. It’s all about making more information available to more people."

"We are trying to do a documentary record of other great cultures of the world. How much we will be able to do will depend on how many additional partners we attract," said James Billington, librarian of Congress.

Search engines blind test

Yesterday, Webmasterbrain.com begun the Search Engine Experiment to discover which of the top search engines really offers the most relevant search results. With 5,000+ participants thus far, here are the partial results:



Test results are automatically updated every 15 minutes.

Searching is the number two web activity

Using a search engine is now the number two activity for web users, research has found.

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the number of US web users taking advantage of search engines has risen sharply since mid-2004 – from 30 per cent of the US web population in July 2004 to its current level of 41 per cent, which translates to some 59 million Americans.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project also found that those likely to spend more time on search engines tend to be in their 30s and well off.

The report added: "Those who use search engines on an average day tend to be heavy internet users. They are much more likely to have broadband connections than dial-up connections; to log on to the internet several times a day; and to have spent considerable time online during the day."

Good news then for search giant Google. Recent research by Nielsen/Netratings found that Google now has some 46 per cent market share in search, double that of its nearest rival Yahoo! Search, with 23 per cent.

Despite the increase in traffic, searching has yet to catch up with the top internet function of email. According to the report, around 52 per cent of all US internet users are pressing the 'send' button on an average day.

Google Analytics - No more sign-ups

According to the Google Analytics "sign up" page, they have temporarily disallowed people from signing up. They also removed the "Add new profile" link from inside analytics which previously allowed a single account to track up to 40 different Web sites. With 234,725 Analytics accounts created (and probably over 200,000 additional profiles), Google has went from tracking zero to almost half a million in about a week.