Some interesting facts about Google

Inscribed by Hariharan

Some interesting facts about Google … Scattered notes taken that have very little to do with the substance of Google founder Larry Page's talk:

Larry Page: Google Co-Founder; President, Google Products; Computer Science Ph.D. Student "On Leave"

Larry Page: "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...'"

Larry Page: "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 Page Rank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."

We missed both things. We didn't go public during the boom. We didn't go bankrupt during the bust.

Why is Google still around:

• We're lucky.
• Deep technical understanding of what we are doing.
  o Not true of many companies (not Inktomi, of course).
• Everybody searches.
• Everything successful in terms of traffic has stayed successful in some way (except for napster; although kazaa's doing pretty well: kazaa is well-designed to be illegal; but not my idea of fun).
• How we make money: ads. I would never have guessed that we had ads for steel buildings...

World Graph of where the searches are coming from... India pretty amazing... Lots more searches coming from India than electric lights at night...