Craig Silverstein, Director of Technology, Google "Industry Perspective" Impressionistic transcript by Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com July 8, 2003 Supernova Conference Washington DC -- We love decentralization at Google, but making that work in a big company is hard. We focus via our mission statement: "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Makes sure everyone understands what's important. "Do things that matter" -- a test to make sure what what we do is important. "Relentless focus on the user" -- makes sure that we're doing the right thing (i.e., no banners) "Brilliant people have good ideas" -- we grow as fast as we can find the people we want to hire, and don't let growth drive us to hiring the wrong people "A creative environment helps" -- good people have to be allowed to be productive [...I've seen this talk before, I think...Google is a cool company, but this story has been told] We solicit ideas from the public through GoogleLabs. [...yes, this is a rerun of the Google presentation from ETCON, see my notes here: http://craphound.com/googleetcon2003.txt ] -- Wireless has finally taken off for us -- lots of people are doing wireless searches on Google [Ed: I do a lot of Sidekick Googling]. We're data-driven: we crunch our logs quickly and use them to help us make good decisions. -- Small teams are fast and agile: But it's tricky to make sure that everyone knows about co-workers who are doing overlapping work and not Balkanizing. We use videos, blogs, group checklists to make sure that everyone knows about related work in the company. People want to know what we'll do with Blogger, but the first thing we did was set up internal blogs. Blogs unlock the knowledge that's locked in our users' heads, and search makes it easy [hey, Google, how about search for Blogger blogs?!] -- Initial user-feedback on Google: "I'm waiting for the rest to load," "Are you from the psych department?" Lots of user testing, refactoring and iteration. -- Computers will be as good at searching as people are... in 200 years. Sergei Brin: The new Blogger release is mostly done, and we're going to add functionality. We've also added a BlogThis! button in the toolbar. Sergei: I wish we'd had micro ads a couple years ago: a lot of great sites went under that we could have saved. Where do I want to see Google's tech in five years? We're not a search engine, we find info. A broad church. It's not just ranked lists of webpages. It may not even be electronic! Question-answering, say. Talking to your cellphone.