Mar 02
lindsayrgwattTechnology google, search, test
You may or may not know, but Google tests hundreds of different versions of their search service every day. They’ve turned their users into a giant set of unwitting testers who are constantly providing them feedback on how to improve their product. This unparalleled ability to conduct tests is one of the skills that makes them currently unsurpassed in search.
Yesterday I turned into one of those testers. While searching for a particular term at work, I came across this design:
Here’s what the same search looked like when performed in a different browser:
What can we glean from this? Well, a few things:
Google’s test index (the number of documents is queries against) may be much bigger than it’s current index. The test page returned 5.2M documents vs. 1.3M for the normal version
Location is going to become more important in your search (no surprise in an increasingly mobile world). Note that in the test version, I can change my location from NYC. This is important, as if I search for “Zanzibar”, I get returned the bar in Hell’s Kitchen as the first result, not the beautiful island off the coast of Africa
Finally, Google thinks that they type of content you’re looking for is as important as what you’re looking for. If you were to click “More” under “Everything” in the test version, a list showing Images, Videos, etc. would have opened up (this normally appears at the top of the page). Just like my employer or Best Buy, Google’s trying to make it easier for you to find info using faceted search.
Why type “Zanzibar photos” when you could type “Zanzibar” and then click “images”. While that takes two steps, it allows you to easily flip between different types of info about Zanzibar, rather than having to re-type your query.
This is an interesting way for them to start to integrate all their different search properties together (Google, images, YouTube, scholar, books, etc.), and I hope it makes it into the real world.
Jan 22
lindsayrgwattRandom china, freedom, google
I was too young to appreciate the beautifully-lucid-yet-logically-untenable propaganda dreamed up by apparatchiks in the Soviet Union, but, fortunately, China is the new Russia. Check out some quotes from the China Global Times’ response to the U.S. asking for freedom of info on the web:
The hard fact that Clinton has failed to highlight in her speech is that bulk of the information flowing from the US and other Western countries is loaded with aggressive rhetoric against those countries that do not follow their lead.
In contrast, in the global information order, countries that are disadvantaged could not produce the massive flow of information required, and could never rival the Western countries in terms of information control and dissemination.
I don’t really understand the logic in the above statement, but, hey-let’s see where this goes!
It is not because the people of China do not want free flow of information or unlimited access to Internet, as in the West. It is just because they recognize the situation that their country is forced to face.
Unlike advanced Western countries, Chinese society is still vulnerable to the effect of multifarious information flowing in, especially when it is for creating disorder.
Yikes. China can create the second biggest economy in the world, send an astronaut into space, become the manufacturer for the world but it still needs its government to protect its people from themselves? Because apparently despite all their achievements over the past few years they are incapable of determining what is ‘true’ and what is a ‘lie’? What b.s. Kudos to Google for threatening to pull out.
Nov 09
lindsayrgwattNYC google, maps, mta, subway
Last week Google added subway lines to the list of items that it shows in Google Maps for NYC. What’s neat about this is that we can now plot where the subway lines are in the real world vs. where they appear on the MTA subway map:
A couple of themes emerge:
- Manhattan is ridiculously oversized in the MTA version. Note how much smaller it should be
- If you live in East Brooklyn or the entire borough of Queens you’re pretty much out of luck when it comes to subway transport
- It is ridiculous how far the subway lines are from both JFK and LaGuardia
Feb 18
lindsayrgwattBusiness google, Kaizen, Toyota
I started my career as a management consultant and one of the concepts that was drilled into our heads was the “experience curve“. It’s the notion that organizations learn over time and this enables them to produce goods at a lower cost per unit – and therefore makes it harder for competitors to underprice them to steal market share.
The other thing notion that was drilled into our heads was the notion of “kaizen” – best exemplified by how Toyota makes continuous small changes to its production lines and therefore is constantly lowering its costs (and subsequently becoming the best auto manufacturer in the world).
I couldn’t help but think of these two concepts today when I read about how Google performs searches on Greg Linden’s blog. The following is total geek-speak, but has stunning ramifications:
The attention to detail at Google is remarkable. Jeff gleefully described the various index compression techniques they created and used over the years. He talked about how they finally settling on a format that grouped four delta of positions together in order to minimize the number of shift operations needed during decompression. Jeff said they paid attention to where their data was laid out on disk, keeping the data they needed to stream over quickly always on the faster outer edge of the disk, leaving the inside for cold data or short reads. They wrote their own recovery for errors with non-parity memory. They wrote their own disk scheduler. They repeatedly modified the Linux kernel to meet their needs. They designed their own servers with no cases, then switched to more standard off-the-rack servers, and now are back to custom servers with no cases again.
Google’s agility is impressive. Jeff said they rolled out seven major rearchitecture efforts in ten years. These changes often would involve completely different index formats or totally new storage systems such as GFS and BigTable. In all of these rollouts, Google always could and sometimes did immediately rollback if something went wrong. In some of these rollouts, they went as far as to have a new datacenter running the new code, an old datacenter running the old, and switch traffic between datacenters. Day to day, searchers constantly were experiencing much smaller changes in experiments and testing of new code. Google does all of this quickly and quietly, without searchers noticing anything has changed.
What this means is Google has and is doing everything they can to wrench the tiniest performance and accuracy gains out of their search. Nothing is too small to change. Toyota’s famous for rejigging it’s production lines to save 5 seconds on a procedure (do this a few hundred times and suddenly your productivity goes way up). When Google engineers make sure that files are stored closer to one another on disk so that they can be accessed faster, they’re doing the same thing, but with bits instead of rivets.
What’s truly phenomenal is that they’re able to maintain this culture despite having a 60+% in search. Toyota is battling GM for the title of world’s biggest automaker, but it’s still a hugely fragmented industry and there’s no global winner. Search, on the other hand, is consolidated amongst Google/Yahoo/Microsoft in most countries.
Feb 16
lindsayrgwattBusiness google, social media, twitter
There are lots of articles out there about how what you say and do online can impact your job/job search, particularly given that once Google indexes something, it doesn’t want to give it up. It’s one thing for the 18-22 year-old set to figure this out; it’s a whole other ball of wax when it’s tech savvy professionals.
Yet, in the past few weeks there have been two massive screw-ups where someone posted something online they shouldn’t have. First, advertising exec James Andrews went to Memphis to see Fedex – one of his company’s larget clients and twittered the following at the airport:
True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, ‘I would die if I had to live here.’
One of Fedex’s employees found out and it almost/may cost Ketchum their business.
Similarly, the Chairman of the Virginian Repbulicans recently twittered that they’d seized control of the house by convincing a Democrat to switch. Except that they hadn’t, and the Democrats figured out who it was and convinced him to stay.
What’s fascinating about these blunders is that they’ve been indexed and are therefore never going to go away. In the past you could just let your errors fade with time, but now they’re sucked in by Google and the blogosphere and will follow you around, possible forever.
Dec 03
lindsayrgwattBusiness, Technology google, Technology
Pretty much ever since I’ve entered the workforce, the company to beat has been Google. They routinely turn up as the most respected/feared/innovative company out there. They grow by leaps and bounds and suck the best talent up across the world. They inspire fear, loathing, envy, jealousy and just about every other emotion possible under the sun.
So how’d they do this? Well, a combination of great ideas, timing and luck. PageRank was genius. Yahoo didn’t agree to buy them. Twice. MapReduce gave them scale. And now they mint money.
And that has meant that they’ve been the greatest place to work. Ever. An engineering-driven company where each person gets free food. The chance to work with the smartest people on earth. And, if you’re an engineer, 20% of your time to pursue whatever you want.
Until now. Now they’re cutting back on the 20% time. According to the WSJ:
So with the U.S. economy in a recession, Google is ratcheting back spending and cutting new projects. “We have to behave as though we don’t know” what’s going to happen, says Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt. The company will curtail the “dark matter,” he says, projects that “haven’t really caught on” and “aren’t really that exciting.” He says the company is “not going to give” an engineer 20 people to work with on certain experimental projects anymore. “When the cycle comes back,” he says, “we will be able to fund his brilliant vision.”
Also, maybe the work-life balance at Google isn’t that great. Schmidt told the McKinsey Quarterly:
For senior executives, it’s probably the case that balance is no longer possible. I would love to have balance in my life except that the world is a global stage and, when I’m sleeping, there’s a crisis in some country, and I still haven’t figured out how not to sleep.
This is a real shame. I’m a huge Google bull and would hate to think that they’re going to become “just another company”. Part of the allure and inspiration of the company is that they’ve done stuff completely differently from the rest of the world and made it work. Let’s hope they don’t become a company full of drone engineers and needlessly hard-charging executives. Sounds like a dull old bank…
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