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By Root 2107 0

only ones and "safe" choices aren't always good choices. I had thought that due diligence meant finding the product most people relied on, then putting pressure on the vendor to cut the price. It never occurred to me to talk to a startup, even though I worked at one. It never occurred to Larry not to do that. We had different tolerances for risk and different ideas about what two smart people working alone could accomplish in a complex technical area—and that is why I spent seven years working in mainstream media while Larry found a partner and founded his own company. Two smart guys working on complex technical problems, it turns out, can accomplish a hell of a lot.

Lost in Translation

The "translation console" was an idea, like building our own ad system and hiring the Trakken guys, that originated with Wunderground, the weather site founded by Larry's college friends. It was a tool for translating our site into all the languages scattered over the face of the earth. Marissa was the chief proponent of implementing it at Google, and Ron Garrett was the lead engineer.

The translation console split all the text on Google's pages into single sentences, phrases, or even words to make it easy for volunteers to translate our interface one bit at a time. When users posted multiple correct translations, they earned editorial power to overwrite awkward or incorrect submissions made by others. If it worked, the system would make our site available in hundreds of different languages—a long and arduous task for us to manage alone.

Insofar as we had a clear strategy, a big part of it seemed to be getting other people to do our work for free. Nowadays that's known as "crowd-sourcing." We just called it "cutting costs." Self-service AdWords, porn cookies, affiliate programs, viral marketing—all were based on many hands lightening the load and the unbeatable value of unpaid labor. Google parsed all its tough problems into manageable pieces and parceled them out.

Our engineering staff worked in teams of three instead of in large groups assigned to a single massive project. Our hardware employed thousands of small computers working in parallel instead of large mainframes. Our desktops ran on Linux, an open-source operating system cobbled together by volunteers. We sharded databases into smaller segments to make searching them faster. When we finally built a trade show booth, Larry and Sergey made us do it as a design contest for college students. Why settle for one "professional" designer when you can have a hundred students applying their creativity?

This divide-and-conquer approach even informed the basic algorithms running Google search. Rather than basing search results solely on a single source—the content of individual web pages—Google looked at links created by millions of people to determine a site's importance. Sergey called it "the democracy of the web," because each link was a vote cast in favor of a site's credibility. That approach made Google scale better than the competition, because the more the web expanded, the more links Google harvested for its ranking algorithm.

The translation console would be another break—it-into—tiny-pieces solution for the big, bloated mess of multiple languages. Marissa and Ron set up some fun languages Googlers could use to test the system before it went live, including Pig Latin, Klingon, and Elmer Fudd ("I'm Feewing Wucky"). Marissa translated our entire interface into Bork, Bork, Bork, the language of the Swedish Chef from the Muppet Show. The first real new interfaces to launch were Afrikaans, Bulgarian, and Catalan, and we formally announced the console to the world on March 27, 2001. Within five months, volunteers had translated Google into sixty—four languages.

That still left a need for translation of our ad products, user—support responses, licensing, and operations. The task of building a globalization group within Google to accomplish these things had been tossed around like a beach ball at a rock concert. Various outside translation agencies billed us enormous amounts for