Google

By: Written By Sonja Magdevski | May 21, 2008 | Lifestyle Technology

Photography By John Hildebrand

Google is a global engineering company whose unrelenting goal is to organize, and therefore manage, the world’s information in order to make it easier for you and me to access it anywhere at anytime.

And they aren’t kidding. In the Google world, information is the king. With 65 offices in 29 countries, including five in India, four in China, three in Canada, two in Russia and one in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and with more than 19,000 employees (and growing), this king is an international superstar. A far cry from Henry VIII, this king is a benevolent one, oftentimes bordering on munificence. “Do no evil,” is the corporate philosophy to which Google’s co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have ascribed from the company’s beginnings, and which is now passed on to generation after generation of new “Googlers,” as the company’s employees are called.

Yes, it may seem sort of corny, but clearly something is working. Google has been rated the No. 1 company to work for in the United States by Forbes magazine for the second year in a row. When I spoke with three of its Googlers from the Santa Monica office, they had nothing but affinity for their workplace. Across the board, all of them said they loved working at Google, mostly because they get to “make a difference,” “contribute to the larger social issues,” and, get this, “they are challenged and inspired by their fellow colleagues all the time because they are smart and hardworking,” they said. OK, now be honest: How many of us can say the same thing about the person we work with who’s sitting next to us right now?

Zaremba: “I’m from the ’60s. I was at Woodstock in ’69 and started working in the computer field right after that. One of the many things that I like about Google is that they have ideals and goals that I can relate to: Do no evil, think green, organize the world’s information and make it readily accessible to everyone. These are good goals to start from.”

Jenniches: “In my experience, Google is committed to positive change through unfettered access to information. It operates in an environmentally sensitive way, and encourages its employees to actively assist in their communities. This socially responsible and socially aware model is hopefully the next iteration of business-as-usual.”

To tell it to you straight, I am probably not the best person to write about Google. Technology is not my strong point. I don’t have a Blackberry or an iPhone. I have never downloaded a song or burned a CD. I don’t have a Facebook page and have watched videos on YouTube.com exactly twice because people have e-mailed me the links. Yes, I do e-mail, though no instant messaging. I rarely send text messages from my cell phone because I can’t find the punctuation keys that allow me to make those cute smiley faces. It took me forever to figure out what “LOL” stood for. Where did LOL begin in the first place?

Jenniches: “If I had time to sit down with everyone I would show them the best way to search for things to get the most information out of our tool. I know our technology is making this happen, and as of yet, it is not like you are talking to someone, but maybe someday it will be.”

Don Zaremba

Nevertheless, my strong point is my curiosity, and you don’t have to be a technocrat to understand that Google has revolutionized the way we see the world and use the exponentially growing amount of information we generate. It all began in 1998 at Stanford University when Brin and Page were doctoral students and created the now-patented and constantly evolving PageRank algorithm – an innovative way to more quickly, easily and accurately search the Internet through a ranking process that instantly selects the most pertinent Web pages to match a query — an algorithm we take for granted today thanks to Google. When you input a search on Google, your search travels to its Web server, which sends it to index servers that match your search keywords with the areas that most likely resemble what you are looking for. Then, the index servers send the search on to the doc servers, which actually generate the matching snippets indicating the search result options that appear on your screen. On average, this entire process takes half a second to complete.

Chiu: “I get to do what I want to do and get paid for it working at Google. I feel like I am making a difference, and I want to make people’s lives better. Working at Google allows me to do that.”

PageRank comes from the ranking or score of a Web page based on the number of links a page has to other pages. The more links a page has connecting the keywords, the more relevant it is, and the higher rank it receives. The list of scores or ranks ultimately ends up on your search results page from most to least relevant, with the highest scoring match on top. Google also incorporates software using “spiders” that constantly crawl the Internet searching for more information to add to its index servers in anticipation of the next search — or next millions of searches. It is estimated that Google receives a billion search requests a day. The goal, therefore, according to Page on Google’s Web site, is to “develop the perfect search engine” that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you exactly what you want.”

Zaremba: “My mom knows nothing at all about computers, yet she knows what it means to do a Google search. Google has made a tremendous impact on everyone’s ability to obtain instant access to accurate information.”

Once publicly introduced, it became a smashing success and revolutionized the way the average person used the Internet. Searching now seemed easy, mainly because the results were relatively accurate. While other search engines worked in similar ways, Google’s impact was precisely because of the precision of its results. This precision launched the company and all Brin and Page needed was a catchy name. Far from a made-up word, Google is actually a play on the term Googol, which is a mathematical term for a 1 followed by a 100 zeros, representing the founders’ mission to organize the immense amount of information available on the Internet. In a recent interview with Fortune magazine, Page stated that he and Brin almost didn’t start Google because of their fear of failure. After Stanford University assured them that if they did fail, they could always return to finish their degrees, they moved forward with the help from an angel investor. “Probably that one decision caused Google to be created,” Page stated in the interview. “… It’s not that we were going to starve or not get jobs or not have a good life or whatever, but you have this fear of failing and of doing something new, which is very natural. In order to do stuff that matters, you need to overcome that.”

Chiu: “We are always working to make our technology easier for the user to access, so people at Google are constantly developing something and improving applications with the user in mind.”

Today, Google is worth an estimated $50 billion. Last year, it made more than Yahoo and Microsoft. The company has moved well beyond its now humble beginnings toward chronicling and conquering the world’s information. It allows you to search images, news, videos, the weather, stock prices and traffic. With Google Maps in most major U.S. cities, you can see the street-level view of a particular address. On Google Book you can read large portions of text, such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Some books are even offered in full-text version. Google Earth allows you to fly anywhere in the world with satellite imagery, or even out into space with Google Sky where you can see galaxies, the moon and Mars. You can do a patent search, a scholar search of peer reviewed journals and a blog search. You can e-mail with Gmail. You can text Google from your cell phone to get instant telephone numbers or you can call GOOG-411 for the same information. This is still only a small portion of what this company does and is in the process of developing.

Jenniches: “You hear so many stories about how this access to information is changing the world, and I see it as a positive. I think everyone should have access to this information. With Internet cafes in all corners of the world, people can contribute to that information pool. They can write a blog or post a video — everyone can leave their footprint.”

If its new job searches are any indication of Google’s wingspan beyond mere search engine giant, recent postings included jobs for “strategic negotiator/submarine cable,” “corporate counsel, music/digital media,” “director, green business strategy and operations,” and “animal health expert.” It seems as if where Google is heading is anyone’s guess. Last year, the company made $16.5 billion in revenue. To date, it has acquired 51 companies, among them are YouTube.com, the online video sharing site, (bought for $1.65 billion in Google stock), and DoubleClick.com, an online advertising company (bought for $3.1 billion in cash).
Google’s detractors say it is getting too large. Some have screamed monopoly and have accused them of violating antitrust regulations. The company has also faced criticism in the areas of copyright infringement, censorship and privacy issues.

Bartley Jenniches

Chiu: “On YouTube, you can learn a language, an instrument, how to dance and makeup application for free. For people who don’t have high-speed Internet, we are working to improve our mobile applications so that people can watch YouTube videos from their cell phones.

Google’s strength is its ability to allow people to seamlessly flow between searching to messaging to sharing to blogging to shopping to posting videos and back again to and from their computers to their cell phones, Blackberries and iPhones and back to their computers all over the world. To fund all of these exchanges, Google generates business from advertisers with its magic wand of Web access connecting people who want the information to those who want to give it. Its share of the search engine pie is 40 percent more than Yahoo, its next closest, or furthest, search rival. Google’s AdWords has made the company an advertising powerhouse, where this same PageRank technology works to match Web ads in the way it matches search queries. The “sponsored links” found at the top and to the right of the screen are ads related to your search. If the sponsored links entice you and you click on it, then the match was successful and the advertiser pays for the click. It is therefore in Google’s best interest to match as many searches with the correct sponsored links.

Jenniches: “Traditionally, media is bought and sold based on eyeballs, and AdWords has really shaken up the way marketers do business. The results are immediate and they are tracked all the way through the process. It is a completely different model of advertising. We are trying to bring a new sort of scale of efficiency to the marketplace.”

Through its upward trajectory, Google has inspired loyalty from hundreds of thousands of people, most notably its employees, who the company famously treats very well. After all, if you are only as good as the people you surround yourself with, then Google is ensuring that it is attracting the best and the brightest out there. Those lucky enough to work at the sprawling Googleplex headquarters at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, Calif., are treated to unbelievable workplace amenities. The free food has become legendary, in addition to the laundry service, complete recreation facilities, including a workout room, massage rooms, video games, pool tables and ping-pong tables, an on-site doctor’s office, barbershop, oil change facility, farmers market and more. All of Google’s offices have similar offerings, such as free food, massages and recreation, though not to such an extent.

Zaremba: “You are respected from the first day when you start working here, and you get plenty of time to finish your work. From a programming point of view, you can’t get much better than this. You are surrounded with lots of bright people and failure is not really an option because our work has to get done and it has to get done right.”

Jane Chiu

Google believes that if the proper tools are given to people who want to make a difference, then they will. They have incorporated a policy called “innovation time off” where employees are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their work time on projects that interest them. Fortuitously enough for Google, many of their new products have originated from their employees’ 20-percent time, including Gmail, AdSense, Orkut and Google News. The overall corporate work policy revolves around what is called “70/20/10” where 70 percent of Google’s resources are spent on its core business, 20 percent goes toward related projects and 10 percent is used for unrelated projects, which accounts for the majority of Google’s new projects, such as their numerous green initiatives.

Jenniches: “My job is not easy, and I wouldn’t say anyone has an easy go of it, but you are with the smartest and most interesting and eclectic people you would want to work with. Everything we do here is novel in the marketplace and I like being on the cutting edge of that. As long as we stick to our corporate philosophy and our motto, there is really nothing we can’t do.”

Bookmarks: Page 1 of 1 pages