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* Anurag worked with Howard Gobioff to integrate the incremental index with the new crawler and with Smith on integrating it with the serving system.
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* For more on orkut, see Chapter 25.
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* We once calculated that serving the extra text characters for "I'm Feeling Lucky" billions of times cost Google millions of dollars each year in bandwidth usage and lost revenue: if users go directly to someone else's website, they bypass the ads on Google's results pages.
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* Amit Singhal joined in December 2000 and led the effort to improve Google's search quality.
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* In 2004 a query on Microsoft's "improved" MSN search engine for "more evil than Satan" brought up both Google and Microsoft, but a search for "evil corporation" went directly to Microsoft's own homepage.
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* Though we did kill BigMailBox, Deja's legacy email service, in June 2001, telling its users that "while Google maintained this service during the transition of the Usenet archive from Deja, offering email does not fit our core mission of giving users access to all information online." Well. Not then anyway.
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* Preparation tip: don't cook the flavoring ingredient more than once, as it loses its potency that way. Just mix it with the butter and fold into the chocolate.
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* Hockey played on ice with a tennis ball and short-handled brooms—while wearing street shoes.
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* Bart Woytowicz, the advertising operations manager, inevitably asked at TGIF how close we were to an IPO. He appeared at the 2003 Halloween party wearing only a barrel to signify the poverty inflicted on him by Google's arthritic grip on the process of becoming a public company.
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* I believed users felt a deeper connection if they learned about Google via news reports or friends and thus felt they had discovered it themselves. Paid advertising depersonalized that experience because "the product" was clearly being sold to many people simultaneously. Danny Sullivan, the noted search guru, described it this way in July 2000: "When I speak about search engines to groups and mention Google, something unusual happens to some members of the audience. They smile and nod, in the way you do when you feel like you've found a secret little getaway that no one else knows about. And each time I speak, I see more and more people smiling and nodding this way, pleased to have discovered Google." Danny Sullivan, Searchenginewatch.com/2207571, "The Search Engine Report," July 5, 2000.
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* Fred Vogelstein, Wired.com, April 9, 2007; http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2007/04/my_other_interv/.
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* Tim became CEO of AOL in 2009.
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* Rainbow 6 was a Tom Clancy novel turned into a videogame featuring a heavily armed paramilitary group.
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* Stephanie Olsen, CNET, December 19, 2001, http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-277198.html.
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* Referred to as "FIGS" for French, Italian, German, and Spanish, and as "CJK" for simplified and traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.
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* http://www.commercialalert.org/issues/culture/search-engines/.
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* Other ads team members at various times included Amit Patel, Jeremy Chao, Erann Gatt, Peter Kappler, Radhika Malpani, John Bauer, Zhe Qian, Laurence Gonsalves, and Jane Manning.
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† Chad named the project "Smart Ad Selection System," which was usually shortened to "SmartASS."
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*Eric once interviewed a job candidate who began explaining the problem at the heart of his doctoral thesis and the way he had arrived at an elegant solution. Before he could describe his breakthrough, Eric asked, "Was it a Hamiltonian system?" The candidate stared at him in awe. That answer had eluded him for months. Eric had deduced it from their five-minute conversation.
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* Though, ironically, I was the one who showed Sergey how to press a shirt when he needed to look presentable for an event. We had an ironing board set up next to the massage table. It may be the only time after my interview that I was able to teach him anything useful.
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*Overture reported revenue of $288 million at the end of 2001, up from $103 million in 2000; http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-962209.html.
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* Mark Sweeney, Revolutionmagazine.com, January 23, 2002, www.brandrepublic.com/news/ 135039.
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* "Margins may tell Overture Story," TheStreet.com, February 19, 2002.
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* AOL sounded like "Aloha," hence the nickname.
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* For more on AOL's culture of negotiation, see Alec Klein, Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner (Simon and Schuster, 2003).
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* http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10003/3089.htm.
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* Inktomi did have an extensive "paid inclusion" program that allowed websites to ensure they showed up in search results.
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* http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1548269.
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† http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jul/21/business/fi-yahoo21.
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* PMMs focused on marketing our revenue-generating products and working with sales on customer acquisition, market analysis, retention, and loyalty. APMs were usually recent grads in training to be PMs.
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* All important Google meetings after this one included a digital countdown clock that showed speakers how much time remained before they had to end their presentations.
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* Overture subsequently sued InfoSpace, a move that sent other potential Overture partners a rather negative message.
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* Director of search technology at Yahoo.
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* There were still tweaks to be made. When the New York Post ran a story about a murder victim whose dismembered body was found in a suitcase, AdSense displayed an ad for a luggage store next to it.
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* The founder of Pyra was Evan Williams, who left Google to found another startup that eventually evolved into the social-networking company Twitter.
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* http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-06-21/opinion/21919208_1_google-algorithms-human-editors.
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* Google changed the name from Froogle to "Google product search" in April 2007; http://news.cnet.com/2100-1038_3-6177393.html.
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* This is known as dynamic IP addressing.
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* One example: If a user wanted to remove all her data from Google's logs, how would she prove it was hers? Her IP address was probably not unique, and family members might have shared her computer, meaning their search data would be tied to the same cookie.
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* ISPs know every site you visit, including Google, though they probably don't retain the sort of historical data that Google has collected.
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* Early on, Larry asked Jim Reese to remove the filter. Jim objected, but Larry insisted. The two dozen people working for Google at the time watched the raw query stream in shock. A large percentage of the terms were pornographic. "Ohmigod," one staffer remarked. "That's what people are using Google for?" After fifteen minutes, Larry asked to have the filter restored. It stayed in place after that.
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* http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/06/technology/06goog.html.
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* MLo now heads up the team of Google Doodle artists.
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* http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20030226&slug=microsoft26.
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† Larry told me once to change an underwriting tag on public radio so it didn't say Google was "a technology company." He didn't want to tip off Microsoft that we had bigger plans than just search.
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* I spoke with Simpsons creator Matt Groening about having Larry and Sergey voice their own characters, but he was skeptical. Microsoft had also asked for a cameo, but had not been pleased when Bill Gates was depicted crushing Homer's startup dreams and saying, "I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks."
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* CP+B won Microsoft's $300 million account in 2008 and created the "I'm a PC" campaign.
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* The name was changed to "orkut" because the Eden.com domain was not for sale. It was intentionally not capitalized to distinguish orkut the service from Orkut the engineer.
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* "Slashdotting" was a well-known online phenomenon: a site was mentioned on slashdot.com and all the users congregating there immediately went to check it out, causing the site's servers to crash under the sudden load.
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* And in Finland for a brief time, because "orkut" in Finnish means "multiple sexual climaxes." Once people realized the site was not for romantic hookups, traffic quickly fell off.
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* Google bought DoubleClick in 2007 for $3.1 billion.
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* Figueroa ran for lieutenant governor in 2006 and came in third among three candidates in the Democratic primary.
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* There were technical issues integrating software from Pyra Labs, the blogging company Google had bought, and there were legal questions about whether launching a new communications vehicle so close to the time we were planning to file for our IPO would violate an SEC-mandated "quiet period."
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* Larry and Sergey have always had a thing for cheap restaurants. They celebrated the initial funding of Google at a Burger King and negotiated the $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube at a Denny's.
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* The line was from a GEICO insurance commercial popular at the time. A week after Google went public, GEICO sued Google for allowing their competitors to place ads on search results for their name.
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* For example, the founders' insistence on valuing the company at $2,718,281,828, which is the product of the mathematical term e times $1 billion.
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† Timothy J. Mullaney, "My Google Grubstake," BusinessWeek, August 16, 2004; www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2004/tc20040816_6051.htm.
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* "Going gold" meant the code had been finalized and was loaded on a master disk, ready to ship to the manufacturer for production.
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* I liked "Gu-Gu," a nonsense sound reminiscent of a bird's song or a baby's cry. Our Chinese staffers felt it was too informal. In 2006, Google chose Gu-Ge, or "harvest song."
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* Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, by Edwin Abbott (1884).
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I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 Page 48