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What were the key decisions that Page and Brin made in the early days of Google

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Re: What were the key decisions that Page and Brin made in the early days of Google

#41

Post by joe_the_user »

resdirector wrote: post #24
paul wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also full of inaccuracies. The "interesting details" are largely wrong. Unfortunately it's written in an authoratative style, so people assume it's true and upvote, demonstrating one of the major flaws in vote based systems.

Agreed re voting systems. I believe that a good Q&A site should use "voting" to recursively find smart people who are similar to you and can provide you with good answers....as opposed to showing the most popular/well-written/pithiest answer. "PeopleRank", maybe.

That's an interesting idea.

The problem is preventing this leading a site dominated by a group of people who share a set of extreme opinions of one sort or another. There's no now site where you can't get karma for reinforcing some commonly held group opinion and if Karma became self-reinforcing, the problem would get harder.

It might not be impossible - maybe you could have secret algorithm for rewarding people only for making well-respected non-polarizing posts. But it would be quite tricky.

Re: What were the key decisions that Page and Brin made in the early days of Google

#43

Post by pg »

jeb wrote: post #37
lisper wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In September 2000 Google had money in the bank only because it had closed a $25M VC round just over a year before. Its revenues were tiny. Its market share was tiny. It was not profitable. Its success was far from assured. By the time Google turned its first profit, the vast majority of its revenues came from AdWords. To say that AdWords had nothing to do with Google's success is akin to saying that Windows had nothi…

It's market share was not tiny. It was growing rapidly, and was already dominating. I think I've had enough of this argument. People like you are never wrong - you are arguing absolutely orthogonal to me, and punctuating it with personal attacks.

Actually it is you who are in the wrong here, though the voters on this thread don't seem to realize it. The guy you're arguing with was an early Google employee. He knows what he's talking about.

Re: What were the key decisions that Page and Brin made in the early days of Google

#44

Post by mleonhard »

resdirector wrote: post #24
paul wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also full of inaccuracies. The "interesting details" are largely wrong. Unfortunately it's written in an authoratative style, so people assume it's true and upvote, demonstrating one of the major flaws in vote based systems.

Agreed re voting systems. I believe that a good Q&A site should use "voting" to recursively find smart people who are similar to you and can provide you with good answers....as opposed to showing the most popular/well-written/pithiest answer. "PeopleRank", maybe.

I started building a site that works kind of like that. It is essentially a reddit clone that will rank articles by how likely you are to vote them up. I put it on hold and decided to first build a product that users would pay for. But I would still like to build this site someday, or use it if someone else builds it first.

Re: What were the key decisions that Page and Brin made in the early days of Google

#45

Post by [deleted] »

jeb wrote: post #28
lisper wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adwards came MUCH MUCH later It's AdWords, not Adwards. And it launched in September of 2000, when Google absolutely did not "dominate the landscape." Do you even bother to check your facts, or do you just make shit up?

In September 2000, Google was already the most important search engine out there. It was already successful, and adwords had nothing to do with its success. It had 20million in the bank already. Please avoid the personal attacks, it's not good form.

[deleted]

Re: What were the key decisions that Page and Brin made in the early days of Google

#46

Post by lisper »

pg wrote: post #43
jeb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's market share was not tiny. It was growing rapidly, and was already dominating. I think I've had enough of this argument. People like you are never wrong - you are arguing absolutely orthogonal to me, and punctuating it with personal attacks.

Actually it is you who are in the wrong here, though the voters on this thread don't seem to realize it. The guy you're arguing with was an early Google employee. He knows what he's talking about.

Thanks for backing me up PG.

BTW, just noticed this too:

> by all words, I don't mean useless words like conjunctions

Conjunctions and other common words are far from useless. If you ignore them you will go badly wrong on queries like "To be or not to be".

Re: What were the key decisions that Page and Brin made in the early days of Google

#47

Post by resdirector »

joe_the_user wrote: post #41
resdirector wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed re voting systems. I believe that a good Q&A site should use "voting" to recursively find smart people who are similar to you and can provide you with good answers....as opposed to showing the most popular/well-written/pithiest answer. "PeopleRank", maybe.

That's an interesting idea. The problem is preventing this leading a site dominated by a group of people who share a set of extreme opinions of one sort or another. There's no now site where you can't get karma for reinforcing some commonly held group opinion and if Karma became self-reinforcing, the problem would get harder. It might not be impossible - maybe you could have secret algorithm for rewarding people only…

Ah, yup, there's ways around that.

The Q&A PeopleRank idea will probably be my next start-up, if Vark doesn't beat me to it. Reading http://blog.vark.com/?p=352, it seems that they're on the right track. (Although their UX is a little clunky).

However, even if Vark builds a kick-ass product, you can still apply the PeopleRank idea to news-sites like HN.

Anyone interested in building a Q&A/news site feel free to message me.

Re: What were the key decisions that Page and Brin made in the early days of Google

#48

Post by jeb »

lisper wrote: post #40
jeb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's market share was not tiny. It was growing rapidly, and was already dominating. I think I've had enough of this argument. People like you are never wrong - you are arguing absolutely orthogonal to me, and punctuating it with personal attacks.

Growing rapidly is not mutually exclusive with being small. In fact, it's much easier to grow rapidly when you're small than when you're big. Here's a reference in support of my position: http://searchenginewatch.com/2165081 This article is from October of 2002, two years later than the time frame in question. At that time, after two years of exponential growth, Google's market share was 30%. In September 2000, Googl…

Here: http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/pressrelease25.html

Google was supplying the search results for Yahoo in the year 2000, long before Adwords. Yahoo was one of the biggest portals at the time. I really don't understand how you can say Google was not relevant before Adwords.

Google was the king of the search business back then, and that was long before Adwords came along.

Adwords was not critical to Googles share when it came to searches. Google was growing massively, everyone was paying attention to Google long before Adwords came on the scene.

Adwords allowed Google make money, but it did not contribute to growth in search.

Who was the major player in search at the time Adwords was introduced? Ask.com? Lycos? Altavista? Or perhaps, Yahoo, powered by Google?

Your position has gotten a bit blurred the more you argue. To clarify again:

- My statement is that Google was a rapidly growing search engine because they made the right UI decisions

- Your statement seems to be that without adwords, Google would have stopped growing and ultimately failed

Am I understanding your argument wrongly? Because it does not make much sense.

Re: What were the key decisions that Page and Brin made in the early days of Google

#49

Post by jeb »

pg wrote: post #43
jeb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's market share was not tiny. It was growing rapidly, and was already dominating. I think I've had enough of this argument. People like you are never wrong - you are arguing absolutely orthogonal to me, and punctuating it with personal attacks.

Actually it is you who are in the wrong here, though the voters on this thread don't seem to realize it. The guy you're arguing with was an early Google employee. He knows what he's talking about.

That's not a particularly strong argument. It's just a call to authority argument without actually adding any real information one way or the other.

Re: What were the key decisions that Page and Brin made in the early days of Google

#50

Post by gruseom »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #26
pg wrote: post #4

The highest ranked answer on that thread, though it contains some interesting details, is way off. Managing VCs well was not what made Google successful-- or what makes any startup successful. The real key decisions were things like realizing search itself was important, at a time when all the other search engines thought it was unsexy, and were trying to get people to start calling them "portals" instead; designing…

Yup. At a time when everyone else had given up on search, mainly because they thought that was as good as it could possibly get and thus the future was in other "value add" areas such as portals and directories, Google's founders saw a way to do it better. They married multiple revolutionary innovations (page rank, commodity PCs as servers, sharded computation / "datacenter as a system") and combined with a little bi…

What they did was enter an existing market with a lot of competition and do something that the competition was absolutely incapable of matching without going back to the drawing board (there are a few other companies who do this too, the list is left as an exercise for the reader).

But that's teasing! Your observation is a shrewd one and now I want to know who you think the others are.

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