Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Craig Silverstein is talking about how Google Inc. works.

Some people think a company has to be evil to some degree to be successful, to play hardball. Craig's glad that Google doesn't think that way.

He's going through general principles. E.g., "Good ideas come from everywhere." (His example is the TouchGraph Google visual browser.) "Communications is key," etc. It's great to hear a company that's walking the walk, but I'd rather have more of a drill down into the development process.

Ah, now he's talking about the documents Google uses to organize engineering, e.g., their weekly engineering report. And they use blogs. (His example is evhead, Evan Williams' blog.) He says no one speculated when they bought Blogger.com that they might use blogging internally. And now it's working out great.

Google maintains a wiki-like page where people can contribute ideas for enhancements. They hold informal brainstorming sessions to evaluate the ideas.

They used to launch betas on the site and wait for feedback. Now they put it through some initial testing. They put experiments up at labs.google.com. (Craig particularly likes Google Sets. "It's particularly useful if you can't remember all the names of the seven dwarves.)

Craig says that Google is hiring. You can practically hear 500 people mentally composing their resumes.

(His slides are as simple as Google's UI.)

I asked why Google only indexes 3 billion pages. Craig says that that's how many they can crawl in a month.

Esther Dyson asks what they'll be doing with their purchase of Applied Semantics, but Craig is amusingly evasive.

Question: The RIAA just sued a college because a local search engine discovered students were sharing MP3s. But Google is even better at finding MP3s. How worried are you?

Answer: We don't let people search for music precisely for these legal reasons. We don't want to make it easy to find illegal information. It's hard to reconcile respect for intellectual property and make all the world's information available.

Question: What are the barriers to all companies being like Google?