Google's 20th Birthday | Hacker News Reader

Google's 20th Birthday

google.com

150 pointsguessmyname52 comments

I remember using Google when it was hosted at Stanford.edu, luckily internet archive captures this moment:

https://web.archive.org/web/19981111183552/http://google.sta...

Notice that the branding is "Google!" with an exclamation point, just like that other Stanford tool for finding stuff online, Yahoo!.

The "About Google!" page is pretty interesting, includes links to Sergey and Larry's grad school personal home pages:

https://web.archive.org/web/19990204033714/http://google.sta...

It also includes, under "credits," this:

Research Funding: NSF, NASA, DARPA and Interval Research

So remember, Google may be touted as a quintessential Silicon Valley startup, but, like virtually all of them, it owes a lot to the work of the federal government.

(And what is Interval Research, you might ask? Wikipedia says it was a Palo Alto tech incubator co-founded by Paul Allen — previously the co-founder of Microsoft. Lol.)

Page and Brin were both initially funded by the National Science Foundation to do the algorithmic work that led to Google [1]. Page was supported by an NSF grant from the 1994 Digital Library Initiative program; Brin was at Stanford on an NSF Graduate Student Fellowship.

[1] https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660

> So remember, Google may be touted as a quintessential Silicon Valley startup, but, like virtually all of them, it owes a lot to the work of the federal government.

Oh, right. The thing that sucks trillions of dollars out of the economy and then claims credit for anything it touched.

The thing that ... supported all that innovation and works hard (though it's currently not doing that great) at keeping the economy in check.

"Supporting innovation" is a low bar. It's easy to do that with lots of money, by allocating a small fraction to investment and wasting the rest.

My point is that the cost isn't justified. Your point is "something happened, therefore it's worth the cost".

I didn't even advocate for the government writing research grants (though I do think it's a good idea). I tried (perhaps badly) to point out that "The thing that sucks trillions of dollars out of the economy" is a terribly silly characterization for the federal government.

The federal government runs on a deficit so it puts more money into the economy than it takes out.

I'm not sure what your point is. That deficit must be paid by value-creators, not the government--the same value-creators that were taxed in the first place.

You're so horribly wrong that you could convincingly make exactly the opposite argument, that the government (and by extension US taxpayers) are owed royalties.

If that were the case then there would be no need to raise taxes compulsorily, would there?

So you think taxes only fund government R&D? And that all taxpaying entities derive outsized profits by relying on government R&D?

I wonder, how much research is there these days that doesn't get at least some money from a government agency? As a casual observer it certainly seems like the government throws so much money around that they have long since crowded out most of the private funding. Having funds going to pretty much every research lab in the country conveniently lets the feds take credit for pretty much everything with no way to refute it because no one knows what the research community would be like today without federal money.

FWIW, Interval Research had William Bricken as a consultant from 1993-2000 on Losp Deductive Engine, logic circuit design based on Laws of Form.

http://iconicmath.com/logic/semiconductors/

http://iconicmath.com/mypdfs/15p-bricken.120903.pdf

Bricken is the fellow who discovered the "Bricken Basis":

    A((B)) = AB
    A() = ()
    A(AB) = A(B)

This is the most parsimonious symbolic representation of Logic (yet found.) LoF with the Bricken basis is a more efficient notation than the standard ones. For example, it permits writing a SAT solver that does not require its inputs to be in normal form.[1] A proof in LoF notation is typically one or two orders of magnitude shorter than one using standard notation.

I'm pretty sure this stuff is the future of digital hardware.

[1] http://joypy.osdn.io/notebooks/Correcet_Programming.html

I’m surprised the federal government isn’t entitled to some form of ownership in the company if it IPOs.

They get taxes typically.

They were research grants. The idea behind a grant is that you don't get anything aside from the "knowledge" gleaned from the research.

For years I remember their about page offering an explanation of how they scrape the web and score links, and a phrase something like “this might sound a bit recursive; that’s because it is!” But I haven’t been able to find it on archive.org or this site.

I've been in this industry for 23 years. A LOT has changed...but I expect I'll be in in for 20-25 more, so I occasionally freak out about how much I know that will be as irrelevant as what I learned in '95 was. (A lot carries over, but...so much doesn't).

Back then we had only physical servers (as a practical concern), Linux was considered risky to rely on, there was no social media, and everything on the web was expressed in highway metaphors and spoken of in capital letters ("The World Wide Web"). "Digital" was considered a fancy word, and to the average geek high speed access meant ISDN, while the average person was just starting to be able to imitate a 14400 baud modem connection sound. Wireless wasn't a thing (draft standard I think) and usenet was actually usable.

Man I miss Usenet. Last time I used a news client was 2006, working at a firm that had an internal NNTP server for announcements, general chatter, for sale ads etc.

I don't think anyone under 30 would have a clue what to do with newsgroups these days.

reddit.com/r/usenet/ is active. But it's not about text anymore.

The Information Superhighway

> usenet was actually usable

When did it stop? comp.lang.* is still pretty active.

snippets here and there keep trucking, but I think it's fair to say Usenet in it's entirety is not what it used to be.

https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/comments/9h6cwt/is_usenet_on...

Congrats Google! You guys have made the world a better place. Search, Adwords, Chrome, Gmail, Maps, Navigation, Youtube, Android, Docs, Drive to name a few. Don't forget about that with everything that's going on. Sometimes the internet feels like it's a bit too focused on negative things.

Thanks! :-) (I was the lead engineer on the first release of AdWords. Good to know someone appreciates our work.)

All the Googlers whose salaries are paid by the product appreciate it too.

I appreciate the technical achievement. But I would have appreciated it even more if it had been a standalone company separated from the rest of Google. The products by themselves are benign, all that power concentrated in the hands of so few is not.

I don’t disagree with you. Unfortunately that part was never up to me.

Happy 20th, Google!

20 is an interesting time of life for any legal entity. I hope you renew your vision of "don't be evil" for your next 20!

With love, me

> I hope you renew your vision of "don't be evil" for your next 20!

I think you mean readopt

I did. Thank you! Can I have another?

This is a good time to present a reminder of how clueless most of us are about how the future will look in the present:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090324232727/http://www.busine...

TBF: the authors concerns were valid, mainly the advertising aspect, which later Google obviously addressed.

The google has been as of late though; It makes me wish the company does not have many birthdays. It's kinda sad.

There are people in college that never knew how much Internet search sucked before Google, or dealt a webmail service with a measly 2MB of storage.

It seems just yesterday they were but a wee lad. So adorable and quirky. Now they're all grown up, sniff, how things have changed.

i wonder if they took real voice samples from people using voice search for that video or if they have been recorded just for this because the audio quality seems to vary quite a bit.

Anyone else noticed the return of the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button?

I wonder if this is related to the anniversary?

Are you able to find a date on https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.google.com/ where the I'm Feeling Lucky button isn't present?

It was removed. See https://www.businessinsider.com/google-just-effectively-kill... for example.

Maybe it's showing it to crawlers/browsers that can't do javascript?

It wasn't removed and is still there. You have to type a query first and Google instant needs to be turned off. It bypasses the results page and selects the first result at the top, like it has always done.

If you mouse over it turns into something else. First time I clicked it, I got a built in solitaire game: https://www.google.com/search?q=solitaire Second time, it linked me to this: https://onetoday.google.com/ It seems to go to random places around google.

I tried 3 times in short succession and got https://www.google.com/doodles every time

> Subject: Re: Russian (8-bit) Search ?

https://obartunov.livejournal.com/174726.html

It means I have been using Google for 20 years! It changed lots of aspects of my life. Thank you Google!

May it not reach its 30th.

10 years is a very short time to erase several exabytes of data, [probably] several hundred million CPUs, and the datacenters that house them.

Why doesn't USA have any doodles?

https://www.google.com/doodles/fourth-of-july-2018

https://www.google.com/doodles/fourth-of-july-2017 through to https://www.google.com/doodles/fourth-of-july-2014

https://www.google.com/doodles/4th-of-july

https://www.google.com/doodles/mothers-day-2010-usa

https://www.google.com/doodles/veterans-day-2016