I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [215]
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* "Co-lo" for "co-location center," a building housing the computers of more than one company.
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* A different data center complained to an ops technician in 2001 that Google's cage drew more power and generated more heat than the entire rest of their operation. In 2002, engineer Amit Patel calculated Google's power usage curve and predicted, "We're going to destroy the universe in 143 years."
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* Industry-speak for a site that was targeted to individual users and branded with a company's own name. Also referred to as a "destination site," because the owner tries to send people there.
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† Not "branding guidelines," as we might have called them at another company. Functionality, not marketing, drove everything we did at Google.
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* Sergey did Google's original design and explained its simplicity by saying, "We didn't have a webmaster, and I don't do HTML."
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* Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg both contributed to the coding of Google's original search engine while at Stanford. Hassan later founded eGroups, a company that enabled online mailing lists. Steremberg founded Wunderground, a popular weather information website that Larry and Sergey often looked to for technical inspiration.
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* So much so that their names came to be fused as one in Google conversations and both were named Google Fellows, the company's highest honor.
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† MapReduce enabled engineers to write prototype programs much more quickly, accelerating the speed of Google's product development and systems improvements.
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* A monthly email that alerted users about new Google features.
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* Insisting on equity was common practice in Silicon Valley at the time. The landlords at Google's University Avenue office wanted a share of the company, but Larry and Sergey refused them as well.
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* "Definitely some VC groups had heartache because we had no revenue model and no projects in place for that revenue," said Salar, and "there were definitely some VCs that were less interested because of the valuation we were expecting."
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† He liked it so much he reserved the honor for exceptional Google staffers rather than well-schooled Google users.
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* The board comprised Larry, Sergey, and the venture capitalists who had put up the money to get Google off the ground: Doerr, Moritz, and Ram Shriram.
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* I'll refer to product managers as "pMs" to avoid confusion with project managers. Project managers focused entirely on the logistics required to complete specific tasks. Product managers made more strategic decisions about every aspect of a product's development.
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* Targeting means matching an ad to the trigger that causes it to be displayed: in this case, selecting ads on the basis of the keywords a user enters into Google, so the ads displayed are relevant to the actual results appearing alongside them.
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* A few months later Krispy Kreme opened its first Peninsula store less than a mile from Google—a good thing because Google's Friday donut consumption quickly rose to eighty dozen.
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* Besides "organic," names that have been applied to search results generated entirely by computer programs include: "algorithmic," "natural," and "objective."
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† From Brin and Page, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," Appendix A.
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* Research firm Millward Brown published a study in 1998 saying CTRs were averaging less than one percent.
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† Wacom is the maker of a stylus and sketch pad that hook up to a computer to enable freehand drawing.
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* A Silicon Valley joke: TLA stands for "three-letter acronym."
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* Noam Shazeer wrote Google's spell-checking software and designed its calculator function.