I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [96]
While Inktomi's cage may have been beautiful, it wasn't completely secure. Google didn't have enough outlets to plug in all their machines, so Zain crawled under the raised floor and snaked out an unused cable from the Inktomi side of the fence. It would have been the ultimate indignity had anyone from Yahoo's jilted partner been around to witness it, but to Google, it was just an opportunity to improvise.
The Wake of the Flood
Early on the morning of Sunday, July 2, Howard Gobioff turned his black Honda Nighthawk into the Google parking lot, killed the motor, pulled off his helmet, shook loose his ponytail, and climbed the stairs. Inside, Romanian roller-hockey enforcer Bogdan Cocosel had been up all night as the push propagated the new index to the thousands of servers in all the data centers. Bogdan nursed the system and, when it appeared to hiccup, cursed it with enthusiasm. Howard sat at the terminal to relieve him.
To those inside the Googleplex, it was a glorious new dawn. There was no going back now. Howard watched as the index skated along the ragged edge of disk capacity. The push held throughout the day, and by the next morning the billion-URL index at last stood locked and loaded and ready to serve. Yahoo would initiate the switchover at eight p.m.
Monday, July 3, 7:45 p.m. The team floated in and around Urs Hölzle's office, anticipating the opening of the spillway and the rush of the incoming torrent of queries into Google's query stream.
Eight p.m. came, but the flood did not appear. Not even a trickle came through. There were no queries from Yahoo being passed to Google. Had Yahoo reconsidered? Had Inktomi somehow sabotaged the deal? Urs called Udi. Yes, it was supposed to have happened at eight p.m. Unfortunately, Yahoo was having problems reconfiguring the DNS (domain name server) that would tell the queries to go to Google instead of Inktomi. No one at Yahoo had changed a DNS entry in quite some time and they had forgotten how to do it.
"You should be seeing it now," Udi told Urs.
"Hmmm ... No."
"Now?"
"Still no. Try changing your DNS expiration time."
A pause.
"How about now?"
Yahoo's traffic came sweeping into Google's data centers and Google itself seemed to swell in magnitude, to be lifted on a crest of queries to the upper tier of online search companies. A loud pop was heard and a cheer went up from the assembled Googlers. Someone had uncorked a single bottle of Dom Perignon and was passing around cups with a sip for each of the dozens of people on hand.
Urs was even more succinct than his Yahoo counterpart had been. "To something!" he said, raising his glass.
The engineers downed their champagne in a gulp and dug into the bag of Big Macs Craig Silverstein had brought in from McDonald's. They wiped their greasy fingers on their jeans and then went home to sleep for many hours. The changeover passed flawlessly. Not a single query was lost. Yahoo had licensed only a portion of Google's full data set, a distinction that would probably make no difference to most Yahoo searchers but meant that Google.com retained absolute superiority.
The only nagging question had been whether the 1B index would cross the finish line with the incremental index running alongside it. It didn't. The incremental solution would continue to elude the Sisyphean efforts of the engineers for months to come. Google satisfied Yahoo with assurances that the incremental index would be completed quickly and that until it was, the new indexer would enable monthly updates to ensure freshness.
The Yahoo deal ended all my concerns about Google's future. We had momentum on our side and no visible obstacles in sight. If we could take Yahoo from Inktomi, who would stop us? I allowed myself to believe that I just might be living a Silicon Valley success story.
I called my mom and dad to tell them the news, since I wasn't sure