The Google Story -- Part I
In a previous post I talked about Search, so, naturally, it follows I talk about the company that just about everyone uses to search for something: Google.
Google has been making news lately. Some think bad things are waiting in the wings so it must branch out and find other means of revenue. And with all the talk about Google caving in to the Chinese government after refusing to turn over information to the United States goverment has people wondering what on Earth is going on.
People should read The Google Story, by David Vise and Mark Malseed. It is a fascinating look at a company that has completely transformed everything from Wall Street to media to mom-and-pop stores. What started as a Stanford PhD project blossomed into a mutli-billion dollar company that has argubly done more to advance technology in the past five years than Microsoft, Apple, or even the mighty Walt Disney Company.
What is clear from the beginning of the book is that Google has never been about making money but rather about improving upon what had come before in order to give the world information for free. Both founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, stood on the shoulders of old search engines such as AltaVista and improved it remarkably. The whole premise is really simple and ingenious when you think about it. The early Google search engine was based on the premise of citations. Academic papers are often ranked on the number and quality of citations, and Brin and Page used the same thinking while building the their first search algorhythm. They downloaded the Web and ranked pages according to citations, spawning the most accurate search results at the time. Genius! Brin and Page managed to discover the piece of puzzle that had made all other search engines clunky and frustrating by not returning helpful results.
Brin and Page had a golden nugget of information, and after numerious tweaks and test around the Stanford campus, it became necessary to leave the PhD program in computer science and build a company. They had been building their own servers, scraping together spare parts in order to stretch their budget while still manage the exponential growth of the Web. It wasn't clear at the time, but such thriftiness has let them build the most powerful computing system to date. And the system is built from spare parts with redundencies built in everywhere, so even if a part breaks, it is easily and quickly repairable but the engine does not stop working.
In the words of Darth Vader, that is "impressive. Most impressive."
The idea of providing information to the world for free has been the end-all-be-all goal of Google. Naturally, providing information for free put profit on the back-burner, and oddly enough Brin and Page had been against the paid advertising that now generates most of their profits.
Taking this into account and following the developments of Google in China and refusing to turn over information to the US government has gotten me thinking: Google seems to compromise only when there is a threat to their ability to provide information for free to the world at-large.
Stay tuned....for The Google Story -- Part II
Google has been making news lately. Some think bad things are waiting in the wings so it must branch out and find other means of revenue. And with all the talk about Google caving in to the Chinese government after refusing to turn over information to the United States goverment has people wondering what on Earth is going on.
People should read The Google Story, by David Vise and Mark Malseed. It is a fascinating look at a company that has completely transformed everything from Wall Street to media to mom-and-pop stores. What started as a Stanford PhD project blossomed into a mutli-billion dollar company that has argubly done more to advance technology in the past five years than Microsoft, Apple, or even the mighty Walt Disney Company.
What is clear from the beginning of the book is that Google has never been about making money but rather about improving upon what had come before in order to give the world information for free. Both founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, stood on the shoulders of old search engines such as AltaVista and improved it remarkably. The whole premise is really simple and ingenious when you think about it. The early Google search engine was based on the premise of citations. Academic papers are often ranked on the number and quality of citations, and Brin and Page used the same thinking while building the their first search algorhythm. They downloaded the Web and ranked pages according to citations, spawning the most accurate search results at the time. Genius! Brin and Page managed to discover the piece of puzzle that had made all other search engines clunky and frustrating by not returning helpful results.
Brin and Page had a golden nugget of information, and after numerious tweaks and test around the Stanford campus, it became necessary to leave the PhD program in computer science and build a company. They had been building their own servers, scraping together spare parts in order to stretch their budget while still manage the exponential growth of the Web. It wasn't clear at the time, but such thriftiness has let them build the most powerful computing system to date. And the system is built from spare parts with redundencies built in everywhere, so even if a part breaks, it is easily and quickly repairable but the engine does not stop working.
In the words of Darth Vader, that is "impressive. Most impressive."
The idea of providing information to the world for free has been the end-all-be-all goal of Google. Naturally, providing information for free put profit on the back-burner, and oddly enough Brin and Page had been against the paid advertising that now generates most of their profits.
Taking this into account and following the developments of Google in China and refusing to turn over information to the US government has gotten me thinking: Google seems to compromise only when there is a threat to their ability to provide information for free to the world at-large.
Stay tuned....for The Google Story -- Part II
posted by Gwynne at
9:15 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home