I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [217]
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† Meaning that posts had to be approved by a designated moderator before they went out to everyone.
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* Matt dressed as a trench-coated spy for the office Halloween party the same year I went as FBI deputy director Skinner from The X-Files. A photo of us somehow ended up on Slashdot, where posters seriously pondered the implications of government agents appearing at an official Google function.
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55. Search engine optimizers: consultants who help clients obtain higher ranking in search-engine results.
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† According to Matt Cutts, at one point automated queries from Web Position Gold—software used by SEOs—accounted for four percent of all queries Google received.
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* He prefers I not use his real name.
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* Including warrants for millions of shares of Google stock once the company went public.
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† FAST Search and Transfer was a Norwegian search company. Microsoft bought it in 2008.
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* Manber became a VP of engineering at Google in early 2006.
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† Yahoo had 48.6 million unique visitors in April 2000, making it number two overall in the Media Metrix rankings for that month, behind only AOL. Google, with slightly more than three million unique visitors, wasn't even in the top one hundred.
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* Keith Kleiner, Shawn Simpson, Frank Cusack, Marc Felton, Gabe Osterland, and Dave McKay with assistance from Jim Reese and Larry Schwimmer, plus Christopher Bosch, who moved into the role of Gerald's apprentice for negotiating purchases.
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† Rackable Systems grew so quickly on Google's business that it went public in 2005. In 2009 it bought the last remnants of SGI (also known as Silicon Graphics), the company whose former headquarters Google now occupies.
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* The average delay in returning results over any given hour.
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* Python is a high-level programming language.
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† Five thousand machines running for twenty-four hours was the equivalent of almost fourteen years of computing time. The likelihood of one or more machines failing during that much activity was high.
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* Googlers would shout "Ben!" just to watch all three heads prairie dog at once, though the Bens soon acquired a Nerf machine gun to discourage interruptions.
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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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