I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [214]
Larry Page and Sergey Brin must also be acknowledged here for handing me a ticket to the most amazing ride I will probably ever experience. Had they changed the way I thought about work, expanded my assessment of my own capabilities, or altered my view of global communication, it would have been enough for me. But they did all that while creating a new technology that reshaped the way everyone thinks about everything. To quote Larry, "Kewl."
To my friends Andy and Lita Unruh, Jan Kerans, and Al and Joanne Riske for enduring the teeth gnashing and mood swings while I struggled to churn out more pages, to my in-laws Maggi and Merritt for tiptoeing around the house so as not to disturb the creative process, to my siblings Jeff and Carolyn for their restraint in not asking me constantly about my progress, to Emily Wood of Google PR for scheduling interviews and shepherding me to them and Karen Wickre for her thoughtful comments and gentle encouragement to stake out my own narrative, to my agent Amy Rennert and my editors George Hodgman, Tom Bouman, and Camille Smith—to all who have helped me get this story out of my head and into print—I extend my true and heartfelt appreciation.
And to those who have read this book and are left with questions about how to get a job at Google, how to improve a site's ranking in Google results, or how to share a great idea for a new Google service, I invite you check out the same helpful resource I would use now that I've been away from the company for half a decade. You can find it at www.Google.com.
Footnotes
* In Larry's binary world, literary license was the moral equivalent of sloppy engineering. I wrote that he was on a campus tour when he met Sergey for the first time. "It was a visit weekend, not a campus tour," he corrected me. The great stories I'd heard about him sleeping under his desk while working on developing Google? Sergey setting up a business office in his dorm room? The strain on Stanford's power grid created by their Google prototype? "It didn't happen that way," Larry told me. "Take it out."
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* The PageRank patent is actually assigned to Stanford, and the university received 1.8 million shares of Google stock for granting Google an exclusive license to use it. Larry and Sergey described the core of the technology in their 1998 paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," available at http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html.
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* In 2006, the Merc's owner Knight Ridder was sold and its assets divided up. The Mercury News is now owned by MediaNews Group, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2010.
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* Yoshka, a Leonberger, was described by engineer Ron Dolin as "a cross between a lion, a horse, and a puppy."
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† Another Googler recalled answering interview questions on Halloween while Sergey, attired in a full-size cow suit, absentmindedly stroked his rubber udder.
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* That was the premise of an Outpost.com spot.
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* Google is a play on "googol," which is the number one followed by a hundred zeroes. The nickname for our office is from "googolplex," ten raised to the power of a googol (one followed by a googol zeros).
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* Like many new Googlers, HR director Stacy Sullivan found the unlimited munchies irresistible. "The first week I couldn't believe having that much free candy. There were huge bowls of M&Ms. I ate so many I threw up."
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* According to Urs, Gerald Ainger and Larry Page did most of the work on the corkboard design. First they ran performance tests on four commercial motherboards