I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [95]
Wall Street didn't buy the expert view. In fact, it sold heavily. By the end of the day, Inktomi's share price had fallen eighteen percent. This despite the fact that Yahoo had thrown Inktomi a bone, naming them a "corporate search" partner for an initiative launched the same day—because everyone knew the real money in search was on the corporate side.
With impeccable timing, I had planned my first vacation to coincide with the most momentous week in Google's history. Sunday night I had trouble falling asleep in our Lake Tahoe hotel, and on Monday I was up early flipping through the cable channels looking for news about the blockbuster Yahoogle deal as my family snuggled under their blankets. Much to my surprise, it wasn't the lead story on any of the major networks and, unbelievably, it didn't make headlines in the Tuesday papers. The San Francisco Chronicle had a brief mention in the business section and the Mercury News had slightly more, yet even that thin coverage signified that things had changed. Up to that point, the mainstream media had portrayed Google as another quirky startup and California cultural oddity, with an emphasis on the wacky ways of western entrepreneurs. Now, however, Google was a business-section item, suggesting that the company should be taken seriously as a corporate entity.
We didn't care what the press said. We knew it was a major win. The Googlers at the Plex celebrated accordingly. On Monday Charlie and his crew prepared a luau lunch and served it up al fresco. The grass was green and freshly mown, the food hot and plentiful, and the spirits high. Music filled the air and margaritas sloshed in paper cups hoisted in salute as Larry and Sergey, wearing plastic leis, introduced Yahoo co-founder David Filo. Filo eschewed the customary rhetorical pats on the back in favor of a brief speech that boiled down to, "Thank you. We have a lot to do. You should really get back to work." Perhaps his absent partner, Jerry Yang, was the party guy.
Susan Wojcicki handed out t-shirts she had secretly ordered proclaiming "Google and Yahoo got lucky"—Google's first official commemorative garment. If you want to make a killing trading tech stocks, find a friend in the t-shirt business between San Francisco and San Jose and ask to be alerted any time a rush order gets placed. Conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley states, "If it's not on a t-shirt, it didn't really happen."
Copy That, Good Buddy
Saturday, July 1. Google was serving the 1B index to all its own users from a new West Coast data center. All that remained was to load a copy of the index into the new data center in Virginia and the old one at Exodus. The Virginia transmission went smoothly, but when ops tried sending a copy to Exodus, it failed. The connection between the data centers couldn't be established, so the data couldn't be sent. Without a copy of the index, the third data center would be useless and Google would be unprepared to handle Yahoo's queries, which were due to start flooding in within forty-eight hours.
Jim, Schwim, and Zain Kahn piled into Jim's ten-year-old Volvo station wagon and sped off to check it out. The network line between the data centers hadn't gone live yet. Instead of relying on outsiders to activate the cable, they opted for a backup system known among technicians as "sneakerware."
"We just ripped out the eighty machines that had the index," recalls Schwim, who helped load the machines that held Google's future into the Volvo. The techs climbed in with the hard drives and drove them to Exodus, where they piled them on the floor of the already overcrowded cage. "We stacked up eighty machines on the ground, with nothing around them, not even cabinets, and we plugged them into these ridiculous power strips so we could copy the index off. You have to imagine someone working at Inktomi thinking, we have