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Comment by zem | Hacker News Reader

> It's a little troubling to me that he has to work for Google (as much as I love GOOG their work is not exactly stuff of Bell Labs: how can we serve more ads?)

google has some very interesting systems problems to be solved that are almost entirely divorced from the fact that the monetary goal is serving ads, or even that the core goal is organising the world's information. the company is seriously attempting to push the boundaries of "how can we make large clusters of people, machines and networks more efficient and productive", and thompson's work on go is squarely in that realm.

(disclaimer: i work for google, but i was a fan of that aspect of the company long before i joined)

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I agree with your gentle disagreement with your parent.

Google serves ads on top of search results for the same reason that ATT sent bills for phone service: to make money. If you focus on Google's ad serving as their reason to exist, then you might as well focus on ATT as a billing company, as those are the direct ways that both make money.

And in that vein, Google and ATT (well, the old ATT) are much more alike than different. They both took existing fledgling technology and essentially re-invented it into a profoundly reliable and life changing system; in fact they all but invented a new science.

There are orders of magnitude difference in depth and impact between twisting two wires together and the physical and information science discovered and invented by ATT, and there are equally orders of magnitude difference between serving up an html page of a computer's directory and the physical and information science discovered and invented by Google.

Either one is a fine place for Ken Thompson or anyone else to work.

Good points. But... why did Google kill Google Labs? Why not have a separate entity for basic research, like Bell Labs? There is no shortage of funding.

I do see a major difference between selling ads to advertisers (and organising the world's personal information for profit) and selling phone service(s) to customers, but maybe that's just my perspective - I've been using the telephone and the web much longer than most people working at Google - I've seen how things could be done differently.

You seem to have misunderstood what Google Labs was. It was not an organization doing basic research. It was (crappy) infrastructure for making neat little experiments available to the public without making them production quality.

Yes, I thought of it as a cross between beta testing and A/B testing. Or throwing spaghetti on the wall and seeing what sticks. Certainly not basic or serious research, which is probably going on right now somewhere in Google.

Yeah, I knew that. I didn't mean to imply it was a separate entity for doing basic research. What I meant was the fact they closed it seemed to suggest that the idea of research for its own sake is not really somethng Google is interested in. At least, that how it looks from outside the Googleplex. Inside it may look different. (And yes, I am aware that employees are allowed to publish. But that research is almost always for the ultimate purpose of furthering ad sales, though it may not be immediately obvious to the outside observer.)

It's also interesting how Google employees, at least the ones who post on HN, seem to be isolated from what is going on elsewhere in the company. Is there cross-pollination between functional groups within Google? Great research organisations often have this quality. (Prepare for waxing poetic from young Google employees who think they are changing the world...)

"labs" was an unfortunate name, google labs was about product experiments rather than basic research. what you want is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_X_Lab, whence emerged (in the "what has google done for us lately" department) the self-driving car and the augmented-reality glasses.

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