Defining Google

CBS has obtained the first interview with Sergey Brin and Larry Page since the Google IPO last August that made them both billionaires. That interview is entitled “Defining Google“.

Some highlights from the interview include the following :

• About 1,000 Google employees became millionaires when the stock went public, and Brin and Page, who are 31 and 32 years old respectively, are worth about $6 billion each
• New products include Google Print, Google Desktop Search, and Keyhole, which can find an aerial photo of almost any address.
• Google revenues comes from click throughs of a sponsored link. The rates are typically between 5 cents and 50 cents per click.
• The Google company motto is: “Do no evil.”
• Both Brin and Page come from brainy families. Page’s dad is a computer science professor, and Brin’s is a math professor. What Brin and Page really excel at is writing computer code. They met as Ph.D. students at Stanford University.
• Google is hiring about 25 new people every week, and receives more than 1,000 resumes a day. Google uses aptitude tests, which it has even placed in technical magazines, hoping some really big brains would tackle the hardest problems. Score well on the test, and you might get a job interview. And then another and another. One recent hire had 14 interviews before getting the job – and that was in the public relations department.

Gadgetmaniac commentary:

1. For those who are investment oriented, here is a 6 month relative stock performance chart of GOOG vs. MSFT … enough said:
   
2. Sergey Brin’s homepage from when he was a student at Stanford, includes a link to a list of his favorite books. There are tens of thousands of books listed, most of which I’ve never heard of, let alone read!! One of the books listed in Sergey’s list of favorites is:
   

   Susan M. Lark, M.D. – Heavy Menstrual Flow and Anemia

   Now, when a self-made billionaire, and someone whom I admire greatly, includes Heavy Menstrual Flow and Anemia among his favorite books, it gets my attention. The most immediate inference is that I have a far too limited view of the world, and that I need to expand my horizons asap!

3. Interestingly, the Stanford site also includes a paper entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine“. The paper describes some of the approaches and architecture used in designing Google, and even includes the following Overview Diagram.
   
   In Google, the web crawling (downloading of web pages) is done by several distributed crawlers. There is a URLserver that sends lists of URLs to be fetched to the crawlers. The web pages that are fetched are then sent to the storeserver. The storeserver then compresses and stores the web pages into a repository. Every web page has an associated ID number called a docID which is assigned whenever a new URL is parsed out of a web page. The indexing function is performed by the indexer and the sorter. The indexer performs a number of functions. It reads the repository, uncompresses the documents, and parses them. Each document is converted into a set of word occurrences called hits. The hits record the word, position in document, an approximation of font size, and capitalization. The indexer distributes these hits into a set of “barrels”, creating a partially sorted forward index. The indexer performs another important function. It parses out all the links in every web page and stores important information about them in an anchors file. This file contains enough information to determine where each link points from and to, and the text of the link.
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   Seems straighforward … now, if I can only find the time to start implementing this architecture…

Related posts:

1. Google Transit Launches
2. TOO – Sergey Brin’s Blog
3. Google Circa 1999
4. The Search for Google
5. Google Labs Aptitude Test