...is coming, it's coming...
Waarmee we gewoon maar heel even willen melden, waarde lezers, dat jullie nog enkele blogpostjes tegoed hebben, dat we weten dat het lang duurt, maar dat we jullie niet vergeten zijn.
Er zijn echter ook andere dringendheden te regelen, zoals De Kaasstolp en sitcom...
...huh...
Wel, how should we put it... zin in een hemelse kaasschotel, een impressief kaasbuffet, of andere duivelslekkere delicatessen?
Ga ervoor, klik maar door! Moehah 8-)
Ik weet het, beste lezer, vol ongeduld zit je te wachten op meer foto's, meer
picture stories, meer sappige details uit het leven van ons reizigers, zomaar voor de wereld uitgespreid...
Maar er zijn paden te bewandelen, rivieren te bevaren, zaken te zoeken, luchtruimen te doorkruisen, en ook, andere verhalen te vertellen. Want, o beste lezer, een groot onrecht is geschied. Tezeer gegrepen door het verhaal van ZAMM (met enig nadenken hoor je intussen te weten waar dat letterwoord voor staat – ga anders bij Google te rade) en recentelijk The Da Vinci Code, had ik helemaal uit het oog verloren dat het laatste deel van My Google Story nooit is verschenen. Enkele dagen geleden daagde me plots waarom de website recentelijk zoveel meer hits scoort – het is de honger van zovelen naar meer bits & quotes!
Ter verontschuldiging hierbij een toemaatje, zijnde de toch wel twee quotes uit The Da Vinci Code die ik de moeite van het bewaren voor het nageslacht waard vond, beiden uit de mond van Teabing:
“The Holy Grail... Most people ask me only where it is. I fear that is a question I may never answer. However... the far more relevant questino is this: What is the Holy Grail?” (p311)
“Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire” (p355)
Zo kunnen we wel weer.
Wel dan nu, beste lezer, ziehier het derde en laatste deel van My Google Story, dat zich zoals gewoonlijk bits- en quotesgewijs tot u laat geworden, met vele boeiende bedenkingen uitgerust Mijn favorieten zijn de allereerste, en die van Lazowska en Ballmer, maar er is voor elk wat wils, veel plezier!
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When asked once what the motto Don’t be Evil meant, CEO Eric Schmidt famously replied that evil is whatever Sergey says is evil.
In the fall of 2004, Microsoft secretly planned a major announcement […] The headline-grabbing news it wanted to unveil was that its search engine had crawled five billion documents on the Internet, besting the comprehensiveness of Google’s index, which had four billion. But a few hours before Microsoft released news about its purported triumph, Google announced that it had doubled its own index to eight billion web pages…
[In May of 2005], the struggle between Google and Microsoft was not primarily about market share, browsers, computer operating systems […] The real battle being waged was over recruiting and retaining the brightest technologists in the world.
Professor Ed Lazowska, who held the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science and engineering at the university [of Washington], his motto was “If you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.” :-)
Google did its best work on numerous initiatives in teams of three to five people, with their leader dubbed UTL, for Uber Team Leader. “We try to keep it small. You just don’t get productivity out of large groups.” Schmidt said. […] “The secret here is not the way we manage but in our selection of the people,” he said. “This model works when you have the right people. It would be a complete failure in an organization of people who wanted to be told what to do and had one big project.”
In a sense, what [Google] had mastered was the reverse of mass-market advertising. Searching and surfing the Web with Google-powered ads was akin to driving down a highway and seeing only billboards that directly related to what you were thinking or discussing at that moment.
Eric Schmidt: “We’re not relying on any particular category or advertiser to some overwhelming regard. Part of it is because of this concept called ‘The Long Tail’. This was the idea that in the Internet age, geography mattered less as low-cost distribution enabled niche products, catering to very specific tastes, to attract large audiences. It turned out that the most popular books, music and movies made up a surprisingly modest proportion of sales for Amazon, Netflix, and other retailers; the rest came from a “long tail” of obscure favorites that the Internet had made easier to find. […] “The surprising thing about The Long Tail’ is how long the long part of the tail really is.”
To foster innovation, Google was creating ‘Founder’s Awards’, multi-million dollar stock awards to be presented regularly to small teams of people that developed the best new ideas […] to retain brilliant innovators who might otherwise leave, taking their ideas with them.
Unable to talk employees out of leaving, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer vowed, “I’m going to fucking kill Google.”
Larry and Sergey unloaded about 400000 shares per month, providing each of them with more than $750 million in cash, and CEO Eric Schmidt sold about 113000 shares every moth. […] Whether Google’s stock price was rising or falling in any given month, it made sense for each of them to sell the identical number of shares on the same date on a regular schedule. This avoided two problems. First, […] there would never be any question about whether they bought or sold stock based on confidential, inside information. Second, […] it ensured that whatever happened, they would have more money than they would ever need. And, because of the existence of two classes of stocks with unequal voting rights. They could safely unload stock without giving up control…
Dr. Alan E. Guttmacher, deputy director of the National Human Genome Research institute: “Until recently, the challenge has been gathering data. Now, the bigger challenge is organizing and accessing it. Google-like approaches are the key to doing that.”
While you may be (hmm, right) anxiously awaiting the arrival of part 3 of Nepal Clicks - showing the last part of our trek to Everest Base Camp - I have to tell you... that it's coming. It seems Heleen and me can't quite keep up with catching up on pics and stories, but we promise: it's all coming. We may though be a bit more selective in the pictures we pick - and maybe you don't mind not being overloaded either.
Meanwhile, I though I'd post Part 2 of the "bits and quotes" from The Google Story. Enjoy!
(Note: "a billboard in the woods" may be what this website is... if anyone knows some good info on "Search Engine Optimization", please email me!)
Bits from “The Google Story”, part 2
…if you are not found on the first three pages of the search results, the top 30 matches, you have built a billboard in the woods. No one will find it.
In the fall of 2001, Ask Jeeves set its sights on an obscure, seven-person firm […] called Teoma […] a “third-generation search technology” […] or what Ask Jeeves came to refer to as Expert Rank. […] They called [Google’s] method global popularity and they called [Teoma’s] method local popularity,
meaning you look more granularly at the Web and see who the
authoritative sources are. […] Brin and Page had concluded that local
popularity would require too much processing power or it would take too
long […] a 50-year-old Greek computer scientist named Apostolos
Gerasoulis, known for his brilliance and for wearing the same T-shirt
several days in a row, had found a way to make the Teoma concept work and do local popularity searches in a fraction of a second. […] [Ask Jeeves bought] Teoma for $4.5 million.
Steve Berkowitz: “In a fast-growing market, it is better to work together to grow the market than to kill competitors and shrink the market.”
Google engineer Joe Beda: “Can 20 percent time work at other companies? I’m sure there are going to be others that try. However, I think that it is important to realize that it is a result of an environment and a philosophy…”
Wes Boyd, president of MoveOn.org: “Google rocks. It raised my perceived IQ by at least 20 points. I can pull a reference or a quote in seconds, and I can figure out who I’m talking to and what they’re known for – a key feature for those of us who are name-memory challenged.”
A Web site called the Wayback Machine, hosted by the nonprofit group Internet Archive, goes even further [than Google’s archive feature]; they’ve amassed an impressively thorough clickable history of the Web going back to 1996… -- Go and see here.
Google means a very large number. It is the number ‘1’ followed by 100 zeros. […] we actually spelled it incorrectly. It is a mathematical term and it is spelled g-o-o-g-o-l. (Baidu.com, the top home-grown Chinese search engine, whose name means “100 times”.)
Sun stands for Stanford University Network.
PageRank is
basically saying, if somebody points to you, you get some fraction of
the importance that they have. […] The page’s ranking is the sum of all
things pointing to it.
Brad Templeton: “It
is not only important to have your privacy. It is important that you
believe you have your privacy. If you even suspect that you are being
watched, it changes your behavior and you become less free as an
individual.”
In many cases, the unfortunate result of going public was that intensity and focus waned as hundreds of employees […] suddenly became millionaires.
“Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” Thus began a letter from Brin and Page accompanying the disclosure of financial and operational details about Google in its mandatory IPO filing […] The founder’s letter was instantly made available electronically to anyone with an Internet connection [go and read it here] They called their letter “An Owner’s Manual for Google Shareholders”.
One of the nice things about traveling is that I get to do some random reading – which for some reason, otherwise barely happens. In Mumbai, just after arriving in India, I picked up a copy of The Google Story by David A. Vise (for about 100 rs, by the way), and found it to be one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read.
Most people who know me also know that I can’t resist bringing some “relief” to anything I read by marking things with my Red Pen… No different with The Google Story – the only problem is that in the process of reading and marking, it sort of becomes my Google Story and I can’t just leave it behind – one more item to send home.
Anyway, as I really enjoyed the book so much, I thought I may amuse you with some “bits and quotes” from it. They’re mostly literal quotes (bold and italics express my personal emphasis thus opinion), ripped from their context, so in some cases they may leave you clueless – if that happens, just go and buy the book, which you should consider anyway :-) (The Amazon or other ads will appear aside this post, I guess, otherwise check out www.thegooglestory.com…)
By the way, I definitely can’t put all the interesting bits from the book here, rather those I can easily put here without copying entire pages – which would also not make the writer very happy, I guess.
There’s plenty of stuff, so I’ll divide this into three or four posts, which should appear in the next few weeks. Enjoy!
(And by the way, the book I'm currently reading is "Small is Beautiful" by E. F. Schumacher, published in the seventies but, well, so far it doesn't feel out of date at all. If you like this, let me know - I may post some "bits" from that book as well...)
Bits from “The Google Story”, part 1
...the most important technological advantage distinguishing Google from would-be competitors is that its employees assemble and customize all of the personal computers the company uses to carry out searches […] Google assembles, deploys, and is constantly improving the capabilities of more than 200000 inexpensive PCs.[…] They run the largest computer system in the world […] some PCs burn out and are not replaced. Instead, other PCs take over. – How’s that for redundancy, huh?
Google is a place where technologists think first of ways to solve problems; only later, if ever, do they worry about how to “monetize” them.
Larry Page: Google was started when Sergey and I where Ph. D. students at Stanford University […] I got this crazy idea that I was going to download the entire Web onto my computer. I told my advisor that it would only take a week. After about a year or so, I had some portion of it. […] So optimism is important […] You have to be a little silly about the goals you are going to set. […] Having a healthy disregard for the impossible.
Google means a very large number. It is the number ‘1’ followed by 100 zeros. […] we actually spelled it incorrectly. It is a mathematical term and it is spelled g-o-o-g-o-l.
Sergey found Stanford an intellectual feast of opportunity for the curious. “I tried so many different things in grad school, the more you stumble around, the more likely you are to stumble across something valuable.
[…] in March 1998, Page and Brin prepared to pitch Paul Flaherty, a Stanford Ph.D. and an architect of Altavista […] AltaVista, they hoped, would pay as much as $1 million to get access to the soon-to-be-patented PageRank system […] Brin and Page [also] tried unsuccessfully to sell their PageRank system to Excite and other search engines. […] [Yahoo] also turned down the chance to buy or license the Google technology.
[late August 1998,] Andy Bechtolsheim, a computer whiz and legendary investor in a string of successful start-ups […] didn’t like to bet on promises. Instead, he looked for several things: ideas that solved real problems he could understand; businesses with the potential to produce real profits; and bright, passionate and capable founders. […] Instead of discussing all the details, Bechtolsheim worte a check made out to “Google Inc.” for $100000, a figure he picked because it was a nice, round number.
Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital […] had seen over and over again how start-up companies founded by pairs of entrepreneurs who shared a common vision had greater chance for success than lone individuals.
Burning Man is a social experiment where an entire city gets built, lived in and then disappears. And that is the biggest performance art piece of the whole event – the art of leaving without leaving anything behind.
For every dollar spent, Google had three times more computing power than its competitors. […] Given the number of computers Google was using, several were destined to fail each day. Sergey and Larry elected to deal with the constant failures through software, bypassing any machines that died rather than manually removing and replacing them. […] The value of having multiple copies of everything became clear when a fire broke out in one of Google’s data centers. […] Google’s redundant systems took over…
Danny Sullivan, a 30-year-old newspaper reporter […] published a study, “A Webmaster’s guide to Search Engines” […] He also began publishing a regular online newsletter called Search Engine Watch. – Check it out here and here.
Brin and Page […] spared no expense when it came to creating the right culture inside the Googleplex and cultivating strong loyalty and job satisfaction […] with free meals, healthy juices, and snacks in abundance […] on-site laundry, hair styling, dental and medical care, a car wash – and, later, day care, fitness facilities with personal trainers, and a professional masseuse – which virtually eliminated the need to leave the office. Beach volleyball, foosball, roller hockey, scooter races, palm trees, bean bag chairs, even dogs – it was all part of making work fun and fostering a creative, playful environment […] Google would even go to charter buses with wireless Internet access so that Googlers who commuted […] could be productive…
With its search engine, Google had a best-of-breed product, a source of revenue through advertising, and a potent brand that conveyed not just excellence but a sense of fun and integrity too.
Eric Schmidt [who was later appointed CEO of Google] also had something else others might view as a weakness but Brin and Page saw as a strength: he had failed at something. […] he had challenged Microsoft by leading the development of Java […] Although the effort proved largely unsuccessful, it showed that Schmidt was not afraid to take on Bill Gates…
Antonella Pisani […] juggled bids, for example, on the term “digital camera” and its plural, “digital cameras” – with the cost of a click on the second averaging $1.08 compared to about 75 cents for the first. The reason […] was that customers who typed in the plural were more likely to end up as buyers.
Advertising on Google proved to be extremely efficient […] Google offered narrow-casting, not broad-casting. […] You are capturing people while they are interested.
Those few people that already know the address of this website, and are already paying it an occasional visit, may notice: the look&feel is changing... slowly.
At present I'm not yet sure whether it's mainly due to my lack of experience in web design (the only actual website I've built before was for Spirit Systems back in 2003 - I think - but meanwhile that site has been updated, well, thoroughly...), or to the (apparent?) complexity of Community Server, but customizations have been quite more time-consuming than I expected.
Anyway, in the next few hours or days you should see some basic but essential improvements, such as the style of the main page conforming more to that of the blogs (you may note that there's a travel blog currently called "Benissimo!", and a rather technical blog called "Site News: CS On the Road"), and some additional buttons on the menu bar...
Note that one of the problems I'm currently facing is that the up and down arrows of the laptop I'm using are no longer working, which doesn't quite help on working smoothly...
If you'd have any suggestions, of course feel welcome to post them as comments! (note that you'll have to "Join" to be able to post comments, but that takes little over 30 seconds...)
...is the name of a Nepalese adventure/trekking/... company
...would be a nice name for a B&B, imho
...could have been the name of this website, instead of Backpack4Life came up...
...are words that have unintentionally become my favourite over the past few months...
As a matter of fact, this blog post is "just to have the first blog post", since I promised to someone to go to bed at a normal time of night (not morning) about an hour ago...
Backpack 4 Life is up and running!
Free