Things I've learned at Google so far
bentilly.blogspot.com
bentilly.blogspot.com
Regarding the stuff you're not supposed to talk about, there are three stages:
1. Amazement at how it all works; wanting to go run and tell all your friends.
2. Fear that talking about Google's advantages would undermine the company (or your position in it)
3. Recognition that nobody would believe you anyway.
By the time you've reached (3) you've come to believe that Google is years ahead of anyone else; you've transferred all loyalties to the company; you accept the idea that you're in an elite of humanity.
The reality is that while Googlers are very smart, and sometimes not even narrow, a lot of their intellectual qualities are not innate. Mostly it's due to a very severe work ethic and having had the leisure and wealth to pursue a field with single-minded focus since they were in their early teens. And much of this is mere bravado, or habitual oneupmanship learned from Ivy-league American schools. Don't be intimidated, and try not to abandon all your own intellectual standards in favor of Google's.
I hope I never reach #3. That sounds like I'd become a kind of person I don't like being.
It's just a matter of psychology. You still have friends outside the company... but you can't talk about what you're doing. You can't even talk about the perks without becoming deeply annoying. You can't talk about the scale without giving away competitive information, or sounding like you're bragging. So at some level, when it comes to your work life, you start putting up a mask to everyone else, and your only true confidants have to be other Googlers.
However the part that I'm objecting to is By the time you've reached (3) you've come to believe that Google is years ahead of anyone else; you've transferred all loyalties to the company; you accept the idea that you're in an elite of humanity. I have a lot of loyalties outside of Google, and recognize a lot of talent that isn't there. (Some of whom I'd like to get there, but that is another story.) There are also a lot of kinds of valuable talent which I don't think are even particularly well represented at Google.
However I'm really enjoying it.
What magically transformative thing happens when they become the average that would be so incredible and unbelievable to non-googlers?
I would describe CS grad school as having "really bright people" as the norm, but while pretty cool, I would never deign to think it as incomprehensible to outsiders or that "nobody would believe [me] anyway".
Are you guys just enjoying some hyperbolic kool-aid or is there really some new breed of uber-man filling the halls of Google?
What's the big deal (sincerely, not sarcastically)?
It's a critical mass problem. One smart person is a useful open-source library. Ten smart people is a successful startup. Twenty thousand smart people is Google.
There're certain efficiencies of scale that you can get with twenty thousand employees that are all empowered to work together. You get more specialization, so your UI designer is really good, and your UI engineer is really good, and your toolsmith is really good, and your backend algorithms person is really good, and the whole product benefits from that. You get the cross-pollination of ideas that occurs when smart people get together over food in a relaxed atmosphere. And you get the accumulated infrastructure built from having ten years of really smart people working on hard problems.
The network organization tends to eliminate the biggest problem that other tech companies have: scale. Typically, you eventually get a dumb middle manager placed on top of a bunch of smart programmers, and the whole group drops to the level of the weakest link. By empowering people to reach out across the organization to whoever's the best person for the task, regardless of the org chart, you can route around weak links. The organization starts being defined by its best performers instead of its worst performers.
I'd still like to someday understand what makes Google qualitatively different from other companies. Because I don't think 20k smart engineers necessarily yields a functional company nor is immediate access to the top levels always a good thing (for obvious reasons).
The people that are working there aren't just the most brilliant in the world, they literally invented a good portion of the internet, computers, computer science, and programming as we know it. They have "the father of the internet" (Vint Cerf), the creator of Vim (Moolenaar), the creator of Python (Guido), the lead developer of Firefox (Goodger), several of the lead Linux kernel developers, the creator of memcahced (Fitzpatrick), Ken Thompson and Rob Pike (both notable for several things), and hundreds of other developers that have already proven their worth (Peter Norvig and Jeff Dean come to mind).
These aren't just smart people, they're smart people who have changed the world.
To put it into context, one day I'm sitting in a meeting and someone says "Mike is working on an algorithm for that." Another person asks, "Burrows?", to which the first person says "Yea." They were talking about Mike Burrows, as in the guy who created the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (among other things). Names of people that have had major impacts like this are routinely brought in casual conversation. It's like working in a programming mecca. The crazy thing is, even the names you wouldn't recognize have most likely had substantial impacts as well.
As for critical mass, Google has it. I was standing in a hallway one day reading stats about search traffic on one of the walls (the wall slightly beyond Larry and Sergey's office, for those who have been there), and sure enough Larry, Steve Jobs, and some other guys walk on right by me. When you're big enough to have people like Steve Jobs walking around your halls... some doors open up that simply aren't open to most start ups and companies.
The thing is though that the company is really laid back. I was eating lunch one day with my team and there was an open seat. Sergey Brin came over and asked if he could eat with us. Another time it happened during TGIF, and we just sat around and drank beers. At a different TGIF I drank beers with Alex Martelli and we talked about some of the Python books he's written and how he got into hacking on Python. TGIF, in case you didn't know, is a weekly meeting that the entire company has. Every Friday the company gets together, Larry and Sergey get up and talk about what Google has done during the past week and then the floor opens up for Googlers to criticize the company, recommend things they can do better, or show appreciation for things well done. Read that again... Every week the company gets together as a whole and does a self-analysis. Any issues that are brought up will be resolved by the next Friday. When Google does something stupid, it's addressed and fixed in under a week. Most companies have a meeting once a year, and there is no self-analysis going on. After the self-analysis is done, Google has beer, food, and often live music. The company just kicks back, relaxes, and bullshits over beer. They do this every week.
As for people that haven't yet made a name for themselves... Google will give you the opportunity to. I was there for two weeks before I was running distributed programs across thousands of machines (prior to being there I had never even done serious multi-threaded programming, yet alone distributed computing). I had a copy of the Internet on one of our teams shares that I would run tests and experiments against. Yea, you read that right, a copy of the Internet (text-only). You are effectively given unlimited resources to do whatever you want. Money is never an issue, only brain power is ever in short supply. You'll never be given hard deadlines, you'll never even really be told what to work on... everything is more of a suggestion. You can find a bug, fix it, and push it live in under 4 hours (I've seen this done) and no one will stop you. If you ever get bored and want to join a different team... your desk and items will be moved to that team within 24 hours (assuming that team can take you on). Engineers are viewed as stem cells... if everyone is brilliant than anyone can learn to fill any role, and they do.
The teams bond really well. No one eats lunch alone, you always eat with your team. All the food is free, so you don't have people packing lunches, and all the food is delicious, so you don't have people leaving campus for lunch. Whenever there was a big blockbuster movie(like Transformers when I was there), Google would buy out the local theaters on opening day and take the company to see them. They made sure that you were having fun, and they made sure that you had time to interact with your team in non-professional settings.
Also, everyone in the company is at your disposal to help. The organization is nearly flat, but it doesn't matter... you'll never see someone say "I'm the Director of Blah", everyone always just uses the title "Software Engineer". It's quite a sensation. I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what it's like working there. It is truly quite difficult to explain to someone who's never been there.
All that said, it's not perfect and there are lots of sore spots (especially as they keep growing). I won't get into them though simply because this is already long winded enough.
All that brilliant work, will just end up making Sergey and Larry even more rich.
Google seems like a great enviroment to learn, but at some point reality bites. Your 130k salary wont buy even a decent two bedroom around mountain view.
1 You either have a wife that makes 6figs, so with a combined salary can afford a two-three bedroom house, + schooling for kids. 2. Try to make it big. That at google aint gonna happen. Maybe you will get an extra 30k, for your extra work, but that's it. In comparison, a 7th year lawyer in a top firm, makes easy 260-300k.
Google Moderator (it's public now). HN user "litewulf" worked on it...
As far as email lists go, the discussions can get quite lively, although I wouldn't generally call them flame wars - civility still holds in general. But they can definitely get long; the term centithread gets thrown around a lot. When I was there one of the longest I saw was about people putting open chocolate milk back in the fridge, and whether or not that was a terrible thing to do :p..
Not sure if they're the same as internal conventions, but I imagine they'd be close.
[cit: http://groups.google.com/group/google-calendar-help-howto/br...]
Of course I can't say anything specific about any of that because Google rightly views a lot of it as key competitive advantages. Which is why descriptions like mine about the experience of being at Google focus so much on the areas we are allowed to talk about. Like food and dogs and smart people.
Is there some kind of process, ala Jack Welch, where people are ranked and the bottom 10% are removed? How does google deal with under-performers?
There're no quotas for removing people (good riddance, the "fire the bottom 10%" school of management always struck me as the best way to create a poisonous, stressful company culture). But it's usually blatantly obvious who the underperformers are...they're the folks who haven't accomplished anything over the last 6 months...
Please treat this as a genuine question - as someone who has only started working a few years ago and never had a management position, I feel my view is correct but am open to learning if/why I'm wrong.
Other companies would love to hire only Google caliber employees but there isn't enough people to hire. So you end up with a company that may have a few superstars and a lot of average programmers. If a superstar slacked off they would have the same productivity as the average coders. It is hard for a manager to complain to that superstar when his productivity is just as good as many of his peers. At Google the slacker would stand out because his peers are all superstars and get A LOT done.
On the teams I was on, this was true in theory but not in practice. There were a few weak performers. If they were mediocre, they slipped by unnoticed; if they were really bad, they would get a ton of performance improvement meetings, second chances, etc, and firing was put off for as long as possible. Not sure if this was due to legal fears or what, but it was my anecdotal experience over 3 years.
This strikes me as a problem, rather than an achievement. Google seems to be jam packed with highly intelligent eggheads, but Google isn't a pure science company - they're trying to work with consumers too. Most of the most successful businessmen and entrepreneurs I know don't come even close to the top 1% of intelligence (and are often even dyslexic) as they need a wider range of faculties like common-sense, charisma, creativity, and "emotional intelligence."
Maybe this guy's in the engineering department and Google does hire a lot of creatives, business types, and what not, but their products have a rather sterile edge that makes me think the engineers always win over there..
While no one comes out and says it, the implication is that most of what constitutes the design profession is mere flimflammery. You don't need a designer to tell you what shade of blue to pick when you can just A/B test a few hundred shades.
That's why a lot of designers quit.
Google uses data to tweak experience of their existing products like Search UI. That's it. Designing interfaces for new products or features is done by designers (or in some case, like many Google Labs products, by developers).
The more woolly aspects of design -- like picking a different font just because of how it "feels" -- Google's pretty hostile to that. There's a default concept of "Googliness" which everyone understands to be a kind of high-energy, primary-color blandness with near-magical UI. There aren't a lot of projects that deviate from that, no matter what the designer thinks.
If you compare it to the kind of design variety you see at Yahoo or even Microsoft you'll see what I mean. At Yahoo a lot of projects are almost led by design, for good (Flickr) or ill (almost everything else). And there are design principles of Flickr which Google could never accept, like "serendipity". The idea that a user interface could be deliberately not laser-efficient, in the name of promoting exploration and community engagement, would totally baffle Google managers and they wouldn't tolerate that kind of designer-talk.
Seeing the incredible engineering innovations going on at Google, and the incredible UI innovations going on elsewhere, makes me a little sad - never the twain shall meet, and instead they're redeemed to making shallow copies of each other and never quite hitting the spot. Over-designed and under-engineered, or vice versa.
Adding design-led products or hiring more designers, however, would kind of change what Google is about IMO. Can engineers be taught design? ;)
Engineers like the Google style, but so do lots of my acquaintances who are non-engineers, from scientists to writers to school teachers.
Designers seem to be the only demographic with a problem.
If anything, I see Google as actually less data-driven in its design than many areas. Industrial psychology and HCI are traditionally very big on data-driven design for interaction design, with a big focus on Methodologies, quantitative measurement of task performance improvement, and various other statistical evaluation metrics. But the main downside of that is that you can't really answer open-ended design questions: you can A/B test between two specific proposed interfaces, and determine A causes N% of users X quantity less hassle than B does (or whatever your metric is), but if you want to invent an entire new interface, you're basically doing a random walk in design space, which will take a really long time to get anywhere. I mean, imagine how many A/B questions you'd have to ask to invent the Gmail interface, using, say, the Hotmail interface as your starting point, and having to justify every change you make from that starting point using data.
I suppose it depends on your norm, though--- Google is very data-driven by the web-design standard, but sort of loosey-goosey, anything-goes compared to the much more statistics-and-methodology-heavy design practices that go on in traditional engineering and HCI.
Meaning dyslexic people are stupid, which among other things that Edison and Einstein were stupid. Nice.
You'll note that immediately upon giving the number I pointed out that there are issues with that method of measurement and gave an honest self-assessment whose upper range was well below what the number said.
(Joking aside, I think you conveyed it pretty well, though I have no real clue what a GRE score of nearly 20 years ago means relatively speaking, or how you can convert it into a measure of intelligence at all...)
But http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/psychology/iq-conversion.html presents a calculator. And if you google around you can find other conversion charts that vary slightly from each other.
Add to that the fact that things change as you age - I scored jolly well on an IQ test when I was 14, which gives me a nice score to slap down posturing pseudo-intellectual guys who like to compare mental dicksize at parties, but I'm well aware that I'd score nowhere near that now. I don't know. As I say, I think you brought it up well, I just don't quite see the relevance.
(Weirdly, though, converting the GRE score I got when I was 21 on that calculator results in almost exactly the IQ score I got when I was 14; perhaps there is something to it..!)
I got 800 on the quantitative part, so put in 1540.
And I went to Public School.
The SATs and GREs are the only standardized tests I've taken. And I only took those because I was considering going to US schools.
If you're curious, on the SATs I got 1300. (For the younger people in the audience, the SATs were rescaled, that score was a lot better then than it would be now.) I believe that I'd have done better if I wasn't sick that day. Having to get up between sections to go vomit in the bathroom is not exactly good for your concentration...
PS: I was classified as Exceptionally Gifted / Learning Disabled and I am perfectly happy to leave it as that. In theory I could take another IQ test, but I think I am a little old to focus on my potential. IMO, your potential is only important when you have yet to accomplish anything.
The only thing I really wish is that my parents, and the various school administrations had ignored the tests too, because they usually resulted in all kinds of "special programs" that did very little to help me deal with school and adolescence and had negligible impact if any on me when I got older.
I see you got snarky replies for writing this. But I'm glad you did. I look forward to seeing you post somewhere, with discussion of the post here on HN, about the issues with IQ tests.
Anyone else who likes to discuss the issue of what to think about IQ tests is someone whose thoughts I'd like to read on a new thread
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1093619
about an article several friends told me about today.
Actually thinking of intelligence as a one-dimensional thing is dangerous in and of itself.
Google Engineers know that they're the best engineers, ever.
I've always found it offputting, but maybe I'm just jealous or something.
edit: Worth adding that this is a common thing among many engineers. Also, I know and like a number of Google interns (and engineers). All that said though, the one expression I've heard more than anything else is "Google hires smart people".
;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Lively
Ok, that's a bit harsh perhaps. In its favor it was a decent idea to merge social gaming and the web, perhaps a bit ahead of its time. I could easily see 3D elements as commonplace on the web in 2012 or so.
And then there's:
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
Which is the same concept as Luis von Ahn's ESP Game, only Googlified and drained of any interface elements that would make the thing actually fun.
The truth is that people don't improve unless they can find shortcomings in themselves that can be improved upon. Which means that good people usually have no problem identifying people who are better at some things than they are. In my experience most have no trouble listing people who are simply better than they are.
So sure, I believe I'm pretty good. But am I as good as any of Robert Morris, Damian Conway or Alan Kay? Of course not, and I'd be an idiot to think otherwise.
However, I think it's only fair to add that, in my interactions with "Googlers" in other situations (i.e. not recruitment) have been really fantastic. Namely, I'd say that the Chromium guys have been amazing, and they're making it a joy to try to get involved (related to a school project out of the scope of this conversation).
In short, I'd be more swayed by the recruiters (who are often engineers) if I felt like they weren't just trying to intimidate me with Google's prestige all the time. We know already :)
Yes, yes, tests are imperfect. Everyone understands this. But they're the best measurement we have -- short of getting to know someone over the course of a few months or years.
Also, tests, because of the way they establish some people as "better" than others, can be very bad for maintaining social harmony. But social harmony isn't a good reason to beat around the bush when one's intelligence is essential to the conversation. People should accept reality.
Edit: And, no, I'm saying this because I have a super-genius level iq. I don't.
For example, I have a Mensa gold certificate saying that I scored in the top 0.5% percentile on a test (actual IQ scores vary based on the type of test but mine was 143.5).
Sounds pretty arrogant, eh?
Generally any statement that equates to "I am intelligent" gets taken this way.
It was only later that I realized he must have been in Mensa himself and was recruiting me.
Proving I wasn't nearly as smart as my test scores indicated.
If there are any Mensa members reading this, you really need to update your website if you want to be taken seriously. OnMouseOver/OnMouseOut makes it look like you're stuck in 1998.
So now we understand Google Wave - they built it for themselves!
If you are young and don't have a family, having your employer cook you healthy meals is probably a net time-saver, even if you do work 9am - 7pm.
Unfortunately, maintaining that work schedule means I'd have to continue to not have a family.
I rarely make it to breakfast, and usually stay a couple hours past dinner.
Reminded me of this:
http://www.rhymeswithorange.com/2008/09/take-your-cat-to-wor...
To me, that more than anything validates their approach to hiring, development and business strategy, of which I would otherwise be very sceptical.
I'd never get hired at Google, and rightly so; I look at some of their stuff and know that I could never do that. I used to think (not without some scornful resentment) that they were elitist snobs, but you just can't argue with their results.
Sure it's wildly successful. But if that stopped making money for Google tomorrow (for example, I automatically mentally filter out all advertisements in my search results, how long before everybody does that), what would their revenue and profitability picture look like? In almost every other product area outside of web search and perhaps email, where Google competes against another company, they haven't done well at all -- both in terms of users and in terms of dollars.
In other words, Google's first product, designed by a couple of grad students, is the loss leader that drives people to their one and only money making product that supplies 99% (not 30%, or 60% or even 80%, 99%!) of their operating capital.
But as far as business is concerned, they are still in a good spot, what with basically owning the internet, even though they haven't monetized it much.
It is fairly obvious that they care more about engineering solutions, with monetization as an afterthought. This means their solutions are extremely dominant in many fields (maps anyone?) - turning that into revenue at some point seems inevitable.
A true statement, they at least have the foundational technologies for doing better, but so far all of the profitable business ideas seem to center around advertising (youtube anyone?). I'm just not sure how much further that idea can stretch...do I really want to see advertisements while building my house in Sketchup?
And Search exists basically to supply inventory for AdWords. They wouldn't have anything to run ads on without search (okay, not quite true, there's AdSense, but they wouldn't have developed either...)
But yeah, that merely proves my point. If click-throughs started to drop, what other money making products does Google have in its portfolio?
(don't get me wrong, I love and use Google products as much as the next fella, but I also understand that their search/ad revenue is what's subsidizing my use of Google Earth or Picassa or whatever)
For example, Google Earth does some actual business business, and probably makes a bit of cash selling pro versions and geospatial servers and services (haven't looked at the 10-k to be honest). Orkut, Sites, Knol, Chat, Wave, Scholar, etc. does not.
Some things like SketchUp are designed as loss leaders like Search to provide content to things that might have a decent revenue stream like Google Earth (except most of the paying users are probably not using the Sketchup Data).
But other, more expensive things like Chrome and Android have a link to making money that's very tenuous at best.
And we also already know that Search Ads account for 99% of Google's revenue stream. Subtract that out and we have a very good idea of where Google's other offerings are.
Doing some quick arithmetic gives me about $200 million left over from all other products and services combined.
Google Apps for business accounts for around $100 million of that (2 million users * $50/yr), which means that really, all other products in Google make up around $100 million dollars/year. I'm willing to wager that a very significant chunk of that remaining $100mil comes from Google Earth geospatial servers for the military and the rest going to the appliances (which surprisingly are not the big hit everybody thought they would be, the appliances should be a multi-billion/yr business unit alone, what went wrong?).
Now, $200+ million is nothing to sneeze at, but we wouldn't talk about Google with such hushed, excited, reverence if they were a $100 or $200 million/yr company, would we? Salesforce.com, which basically sells one thing, just did a Billion dollar year. We also have no idea if those figures represent profit or not. Google docs for example runs on the same multi-billion dollar infrastructure as does search...would it be nearly as compelling of a service if it really had to pay for itself?
We all conflate their great technology with their market success, but really Google is just a really good advertising conduit that just so happens to have really good technology -- their other technology is not impactful in nearly the same way monetarily to them.
By way of comparison, Google is about the same revenue-size as the top-5 advertising agencies.
But Google's actual technology business is about the size of ClickSoftware Technologies(NASDAQ:CKSW) -- and I don't recall seeing lots of posts on any tech site about their offerings.
None of this is any great mystery. The numbers are out there and it's easy to make some educated guesses. Google knows this too, which is why they are rapidly trying to diversify into other areas. For example, Google Docs was a $0/yr business not that long ago -- I wish I could turn a switch and grow something into a $100mil/yr operation in a couple of years.
On the other hand, if we look at Microsoft, they aren't even interested in an idea unless it has at least a billion/yr revenue opportunity attached to it. So many of the things that Google is doing now, to build up to, and exceed, that kind of revenue target, would never have happened at Microsoft -- and there's something to be said about that.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/google-planning-sto...
Gmail, Google Enterprise, Google Docs, Google Apps, Google Checkout, Google Earth, Google Maps -- these would all be highly interesting startups, some of them profitable, were they not inside Google. As it is, now they are more part of Google's long-term strategic plans.
And as I posted in another comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1093455), outside of Apps for business, really don't make any money for anybody. A quick analysis shows that subtract search/ad revenue and Google Apps for business, and all other offerings have to fit within about $100mil/yr revenue stream. This makes me think that most of the acquisitions have failed to grow much since being purchased.
Again, Google may be full of smart people, and I love using Google products, but money makers they are not.
That means,
Google Earth Enterprise Geospatial Servers + Google Earth Pro + Google Products/Checkout (minus advertising revenue from that) + Google Appliances + Google Sketchup Pro + More Picassa Space + Google Voice long distance service fees + whatever else all account for $100mil/yr in revenue. Those aren't ad supported services and nearly all of those were acquisitions.
Google Appliances should be a multi-billion dollar/yr business, supplanting everything from document and content management systems, to Sharepoint, to many types of traditional Oracle installations, yet we know that it's entire business sits at under $100mil/yr. Let's be generous, and in a flight of fancy say it sits at $90mil/yr, that means that all the rest of those products would have to do less than $10mil/yr.
Too much you say! Google voice Long Distance has to do something in the neighborhood of $5mil/yr! And I know personally of at least a dozen or so Google Earth Enterprise Server Installs, at ~$20k a pop (or whatever the pricing is), that's not a whole lot of money. ESRI has a similar business at just under $.75 billion/yr. Assuming there are quite a few more installs than I personally know about, let's say all added up, $2mil/yr in geospatial products (that's about 10x the value of what I've personally seen so I feel I'm being pretty generous here). So the Appliance business couldn't possibly be that "big".
In other words, no matter how you mix the numbers, the performance of these offerings is not very good. I'm currently working in a startup, and we're doing numbers like this and we're considered very under-performing by our investors right now. It would rankle me in all kinds of ways were I in google management that these products are not each at least $20-30mil/yr interests and one or two of them should be $billion+/yr interests.
Again, don't get me wrong, I love Google and their products and services. I probably use most of what I just listed here at least 2-3x a week. But Google is an advertising agency that uses a novel distribution channel for it's advertising clients. It's not really much of a products company in the same way Microsoft of Apple is. Google should be analyzed more in terms of comparison to other ad channels and agencies not in terms of direct competition with technology vendors. This is the flaw analysts, users, employees and competitors make.
*brought us = made popular, not necessarily invented.
With all these smart people, why has the experience of google search not improved substantially over the last 10 years? Sure, there's more little geegaws in search now, but the experience of finding what I want hasn't gotten any easier.
I work in Google Search, and we actively try to identify areas that people are having difficulty with and then come up with ways to make their search experience better. Unfortunately, most of the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. If we knew precisely where the pain points were, we'd be much better able to solve them.
I was thinking I could email you at the address in your profile, but when I think about it, it might be more productive to post a Ask HN here once I have a better explanation of what I mean. Then the whole community could participate, which seems like it would be constructive.
Also, to be clear, I'm speaking in an unofficial capacity here, as myself. I'm quite curious what people's frustrations are, but I can't promise anything.
It feels like a cheap cop-out for controlling spam: the side effect is that you have heavy hitters like Maholo, Target, etc... all out spamming the more relevant websites.
A more general example of this algorithm problem is that it ranks the pages of Digg, HN, or similar to be higher than the actual website it links to, and most of the times those pages are devoid of any actual content, merely containing a couple of votes and no comments.
Google has let their core brand go bad.
When you do find a lot of spam, does Show Options -> Fewer Shopping Sites help?
A guess is that this is the result of the reliance on domain names for ranking. The high-quality lyrics are distributed across millions of separate domain names, since fansites typically are dedicated to only one band. The low-quality, ring-tones-heavy lyrics sites, though, are centralized, with every band's lyrics on the same domain.
Expected result is something like: http://www.joydiv.org/shadowplay/joyd/warsaw.html
What I actually get are a bunch of sites with names like mp3lyrics, songlyrics, musicsonglyrics. It might be that the word "lyrics" in my query is boosting that sort of stuff to the top? From what I can tell, Google also penalizes old / rarely updated sites, which probably hurts these kinds of pages--- the page linked above was last updated in 2007, but it's still the best result for that query.
My personal experience of search got a lot better when they started suppressing mirrored content. For me to go back to what they had 10 years ago would be painful. Another improvement that I like is the ability to use search to find stuff on a particular site.
What change would make it better for you?
What do you mean the company is complex?
It's not clear to me why solving difficult problems merits organizational or operational complexity.
Before you're done you'll have built a lot of pieces of software that do different things that have complex little dependencies on each other.
Now iterate that through many generations of development, and build some other systems that tackle similar problems.
Do that and you'll discover why Google's infrastructure is complex.
As somebody external to Google, it seems to me that this approach largely does not exist at Google (or if it does, it exists only for particular isolated pieces). Is this true? Or rather? What's Google's method for containing, directing and handling this complexity if it's not a traditional EA thinking process?
I don't think I'm supposed to answer it.
However Google's answer would be part of the, "nobody would believe me" piece of neilk's top-rated comment.
1. All those millions of people are competing against each other - many of them will cancel each other out.
2. It doesn't seem at all like google can't control spam, but that given well-funded companies (ideally from California) they look the other way. It seems less like a lack of resources and more like a lack of integrity.
However if you happen to know someone there, they have the freedom to meet you on campus and show you around all they like.
Of course, you do get a nice tour and lunch if you get interviewed :)
Edit: Ha. Somewhat appropriately, were you to have a campus tour of Mountain View around about today, and should you visit a bathroom in that time, you'd see a quote from pg's "Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule" on the back of the stall door...
It's a fairly interesting view from someone just starting out in a company that has an almost mystical appeal.
>> (I'm surprised that the figure is so low.)
I wonder why you are surprised? Actually it's very high. Imagine Google don't offer 20% for its' employees, will their productivity (in their real jobs) increase? Probably not, you won't work 100% of your time, you'll work 70% or 80% in best cases.
Google profit from this wasted 20% to turn it into useful mini-applications, that can turn big in the future and the best example is Gmail.
Usually, people use the official personal time to take mini-sabbaticals with other projects, or write tools to make their own lives easier (which may have more general use within the company, or beyond.)
I've tried, without success so far, though I've got a bunch of things in the half-done state that could turn into something useful eventually. It is very hard, kinda like starting up a company while keeping your day job.
I've found I had the most success by just trying to get my 80% project out of the way as fast as possible, doing as much as needed to keep my teammates happy, and then banking the remaining time to work on 20% projects. It's best used in chunks of a week or so, so that you can actually finish a lot and have something concrete that can sit and wait for your next big chunk of time.
I have no issue with only 20% of your time being officially set aside for side projects.
I only ever hear about the intense scrutiny engineers have to go through (and various quasi-discriminatory practices regarding school pedigree), but say I'm past the "I want to be an engineer" phase of my life and now work squarely in management.
What's the process for that?
More about him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Norris
What's the point from Blogging? -> Getting the word to the others. and it does it well, so it's not crap.
Blogger has a lot of paper cuts that slowly make it either unbearable to use or unsightly to visit.
It takes me 4 refreshes just to comment on a page.
For my own high-powered purposes I've written a completely custom CMS with fully encrypted and extensible object types based on pure text. But have I written an "object" with a WYSIWYG editor, Labels, Archives, and other stuff built in yet? Heck no. So blogger.com here I come.
It might be a bit flaky, but for the average end user its significantly (perhaps "infinitely") more useful than an FTP client and a text editor.
Maybe what you want is Google Sites?
When I wanted to start a blog it was there and free. I've seen lots of other people use it. And so far it has been good enough for my needs.
If I was a serious blogger I'd likely find things I didn't like about it and look for something better. But until some obvious shortcoming irritates me, it isn't worth the effort for me to find something better.
...So why isn't it better?
EDIT TO ADD: You know, this is really part of the bigger problem. Google has a fair amount of side services that just barely scoot by and it's pretty stupid. Example: Google is a search engine company, but their Chrome Extension Search page HAS NO SEARCH FEATURES.
As for Google's software, a lot of people at Google fully agree with the startup idea that you should release something fast then iterate. That means that we release a lot of stuff that (quite deliberately) doesn't have a lot of corporate spit and polish. And things that don't come to our attention as seriously needing improvement are liable to remain unimproved.
If you think that something particularly needs improvement, send feedback.
But Blogger has been out for a looooong time.
It's hard to judge a company just in one month especially when some people might spend their first week (or two) doing company orientation.
I'd be eager to hear an honest assessment from him after a year though. There has to be a reason why brilliant and motivated people leave Google, after all.
The OMG-everyone's-so-smart factor does fade as you get accustomed to all the proprietary infrastructure and realize that hey, I'm smart too. Eventually, intelligence just doesn't matter all that much. It's like my dad's story about starting at MIT: the first 2 weeks, everybody has their phi-beta-kappa rings on all the time. After a month, they've all disappeared, because you realize that everybody else has one too, and then smarts just aren't an issue afterwards.
You also tend to become more overworked as you gain competence. There's far more that we'd like to do than what we can do. Eventually that marveling at "Oh my god we built this" becomes "Oh shit I have to build this", which can be very satisfying, but also is a lot of work.
I offered advice on gmail that solves complaints I have heard about it in the past from heavy email users. I described a scene of perpetual chaos that plenty of people would hate. And I gave the piece of information that Google is hiring.
Those are three pieces of information that I thought were worthwhile sharing which are definitely not simply "Google is cool".
This was personally frustrating, because I got through the interview process in Feb, got approved by the hiring committee, then headcount was not approved. Which put me in a state of indefinite limbo. So I had found a different job by the time they contacted me again in October.
Bit like your comment. Hence the downvote.
It is interesting that someone from the outside has now joined Google and found a lot that they would like to say, but can't.
I've also seen anecdotal evidence that the 20% time is largely ignored and up to the employee to push for, but he comments that it's both used a lot and you are marked on it. I guess that varies with where in Google you work.