I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [94]
"Anurag cranked maybe six to eight weeks and he had something that kinda worked," recalls Smith. "He wrote a new server called 'the mixer,' which hid the fact that we were talking to two different indices [a daily index and the main index] and mixed them together."*
"Anurag and I were very stressed," Smith went on. "For whatever reason, we had to keep it quiet." They couldn't talk about what they were doing or why they were in the office every night after even the vampire coders had gone home. "Many, many days, we'd leave somewhere between three and five a.m. That was the time when Anurag and I could try to plug in our new system, because that was when Google had the least amount of search traffic. There were a lot of days where it was, 'Let's turn it on and see how it works,' because we didn't really know. The mixer would talk to the cache and the mixer would talk to the incremental. And sometimes the mixer would melt down and sometimes the incremental would melt down, because it didn't have enough capacity, and we'd say, 'Okay. Why? What happened and how do you fix it?'"
The hours and the stress shaved tolerances among the engineers until little remained to insulate their frustrations from the friction of the outside world.
"For a large fraction of my career here," Smith explained to me, "I worked on infrastructure or on the serving side. Larry seemed much more interested in the product aspect of things. He wasn't interested in the infrastructure side of the Yahoo deal—he didn't even know what was going on regarding it. I remember one time he wandered into my office and made some crack like 'You need to relax more,' and I just chewed him out."
Because the 1B index devoured almost all the available machines, only a few hundred remained for the incremental team to use. Even if ops could have built them faster, there were no data centers in which to put them. The team struggled on as the last days of May passed and July loomed over the horizon like the Imperial death star.
Yahoogle
The final deadline was a week away.
The machines were built, the data centers filled. The crawler had worked. The indexer had worked. The pageranker had worked. Google had identified a billion URLs and now could search them. We had the superior technology. The Yahoo deal proved we had the business smarts to go with it. It was time to take our light from under its bushel and show it to the world.
At 2:59 a.m. on Monday, June 26, 2000, Cindy sat in her office, her fingers poised on the keyboard, waiting to hit Send. On her screen was a press release announcing that Google was now the largest search engine on the planet. A minute later, just in time to feed the gaping morning news maw on the East Coast, the message was on its way. Cindy gave the business and technology editors an hour to digest that tantalizing morsel, then served the pièce de résistance: a brief announcement that Google had signed a contract to replace Inktomi as the search technology provider for Yahoo. It was the biggest accomplishment in our company's short life.
The experts were underwhelmed.
"Analysts agreed that the announcement may have hurt Inktomi's pride," CNET reported, "but they said the implications for its revenues and profitability are mild ... That side of its business is a money loser that has increasingly played second fiddle to its exploding networking-services division. The search market in general, meanwhile,