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How did Google get so big?

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Re: How did Google get so big?

#311

Post by kofejnik »

foobarian wrote: post #291
nostrademons wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't - AltaVista was done by Louis Monier and Mike Burrows, both of whom also worked at Google and both of whom also made significant contributions to the codebase. I do agree that management was the critical ingredient - my former VP at Google (employee #48) credited Urs Hoelzle (employee #9, and Google's first VP) as a key ingredient to Google's success. Ironically, though, Google hired Western Digital's man…

Mike Burrows was a coauthor on the algorithm behind bz2 [1]. It's the most mindblowing algorithm I ever encountered and so I have utmost respect for that couple of guys :) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transf...

thanks for sharing, it seriously is amazing

Re: How did Google get so big?

#312

Post by Merad »

fixermark wrote: post #295
xg15 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine you run a website. Some day, for whatever reason, Google is blacklisting you. Are you going to say "eh, no big deal, I'll just have my customers use Bing instead"?

Your customers already know how to get to your website: yourdomain.com. Do you mean "Some day, for whatever reason, Google stops directing traffic to your website of people who don't know who you are, for free?" Sounds like it's time to spend some money on advertising. Their ability to kick a bunch of traffic towards you or refrain from doing so makes them a market-maker, but they share that with newspaper and televi…

You haven’t interacted with many average users, have you? When instructed to go to “yourdomain.com”, they’ll bring up google and search for yourdomain.com. If it doesn’t appear in google search results, it effectively doesn’t exist to an enormous segment of users.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#313

Post by dmead »

wallflower wrote: post #8

If I could give a six word response for the technical side: "Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat and team". To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot remember, he said that the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and their team have time and time again managed to design and build st…

"And now their team's attention is on AI..." is quite the hype thing to say. Just because you can build a bigger bridge doesn't mean you're a good car designer.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#314

Post by XorNot »

jonny_eh wrote: post #303
nostrademons wrote: post #122

On the market end - Google got huge because they inserted themselves as a critical part of peoples' usage of a resource that got even huger. As late as 2013, my coworkers and I would mock the Wall Street analysts who covered Google because (you could tell from their questions on the earnings call) they assumed that the Internet was no longer growing. So all the focus was on CPCs and Google's ability to monetize, when…

Coinbase is not the next Google. They provide no actual value, beyond making it easy to join a bubble. Google's value proposition in the early days was enormous, very obvious, and continues to this day.

The point though is that Coinbase is the same kind of play. And really, you don't need to be "as big as Google" to succeed in life - you just need to make your millions and get out with them.

Coinbase is a bet on the idea that there's enough crypto-enthusiasm that they can capture a small part of a lot money while it lasts.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#315

Post by nostrademons »

jonny_eh wrote: post #303
nostrademons wrote: post #122

On the market end - Google got huge because they inserted themselves as a critical part of peoples' usage of a resource that got even huger. As late as 2013, my coworkers and I would mock the Wall Street analysts who covered Google because (you could tell from their questions on the earnings call) they assumed that the Internet was no longer growing. So all the focus was on CPCs and Google's ability to monetize, when…

Coinbase is not the next Google. They provide no actual value, beyond making it easy to join a bubble. Google's value proposition in the early days was enormous, very obvious, and continues to this day.

If you have already accepted cryptocurrencies as the wave of the future, Coinbase provides enormous value. You can't do much in the crypto world without owning some cryptocurrencies, and they are the largest, easiest to use, and generally most trusted way to exchange $USD for Bitcoin or Ethereum.

Most Americans have not accepted that premise (and I don't exclude myself...I'm on the fence as for whether crypto is a bubble or the future of world commerce). However, I'll point out that in 1996 when Larry/Sergey/Scott Hassan were first working on Google, it was far from obvious that the web would be a big thing. Streaming audio (via RealAudio/WMP/etc.) was a year in the future; most Americans had 14.4K connections that made it impossible (my first MP3 took 2 hours to download a 5 minute song). E-commerce was clunky and sluggish, and the big "order everything online!" push was 2 years in the future. There were only 36M users online, roughly the same order as the number of Bitcoin users in the U.S. (Bitcoin has more international adoption though). Interactive websites were almost unknown, because the technology really didn't support it. Most people used the web for porn, or to lookup song lyrics and share their favorite bands, or to share scientific information.

It wasn't until the early 2000s, after the dot-com bubble burst and yet people continued using the Internet (and found a lot of new uses for it, like dating/socializing/paying for things/watching videos/sharing photos/finding lodging), that it became apparent that it was really here to stay. Not coincidentally, those were Google's biggest growth years.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#316

Post by gretch »

smt88 wrote: post #308
gretch wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe there were additional reasons, but tbh the answer you gave was very bad and probably would have been grounds enough to not hire you. >"Sure, everyone thinks you're a tech company or a search company or whatever - but Google is an advertising company, and thats it. All the other stuff distracts from the fact that youre just the most profitable ad company." When given the opportunity to demonstrate nuanced thinki…

In terms of revenue and profit, Google was and is an ad company. A concise answer to the question couldn't really be much more accurate.

I think you're making the point with your own answer.

You say "in terms of revenue and profit...". Oh! Great point. I'd say you are right. What if you were to frame it in other terms?

I mean if the entirety of Google can be summed up in 3 sentences, what topics in the world do you consider to have depth?

Imo it's looking at a Shakespeare sonnet and saying 'yeah it's fucking poem'

Re: How did Google get so big?

#317

Post by adventured »

seabrookmx wrote: post #297
adventured wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google was solely responsible for YouTube's ultimate success and they deserve the credit accordingly. It was a dead company if they didn't buy it, they were rapidly bleeding to death financially and the legal picture was disastrous. It was viewed as a stupid mistake of a purchase in part because the argument was they would be a giant red ink pit forever. The sole reason YouTube survived the legal attack was due to Go…

> Universally the high profit, small share player I'm curious though, was this always supposed to be the case? I think Apple has adapted amazingly well to the market (look at their profits) but I don't think there's any evidence that this has been a holistic, from the start business strategy for them. I know my Elementary and High schools had Macs because of Apple's aggressive Educational discounts, and at the time i…

I doubt that was their original intention. However I do think it's an inherent consequence to what they do (building and controlling their own ecosystem top to bottom, not licensing the OS, staying in the higher price tiers, etc).

Steve Jobs basically admitted the Apple approach only works in that model. In the 2007 Jobs / Gates discussion at D5 [1]. He pointed out that the whole thing only works because of PC guy (they were joking about the PC guy vs Mac guy ads). What he meant was, the Apple approach requires that context. Where they can be the high quality, high profit, smaller market share position and always have the PC guy competitor as the contrast to amplify their own appeal.

If everyone has a Gucci bag, it's not a Gucci bag any longer.

The best thing that ever happened to Apple, was Google buying and building up Android as the 85% market player. Jobs should have been thanking them every day for that perceived betrayal. The ideal was always to have another PC guy scenario to play off of. You want tons of shitty Android phones out there in the market to compete against. Let them have the worthless bottom ~50% of the market financially, where there's zero profit to be had and lots of mediocre consumer experiences. That makes what Apple does a lot easier, in terms of pitching their value proposition to customers.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWaX1g_2SSQ

Re: How did Google get so big?

#318

Post by smt88 »

gretch wrote: post #316
smt88 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of revenue and profit, Google was and is an ad company. A concise answer to the question couldn't really be much more accurate.

I think you're making the point with your own answer. You say "in terms of revenue and profit...". Oh! Great point. I'd say you are right. What if you were to frame it in other terms? I mean if the entirety of Google can be summed up in 3 sentences, what topics in the world do you consider to have depth? Imo it's looking at a Shakespeare sonnet and saying 'yeah it's fucking poem'

They asked him what kind of company Google is. They weren't asking for an essay on a Shakespeare sonnet or anything close to that end of the spectrum.

Re: How did Google get so big?

#319

Post by rhymenoceros »

wallflower wrote: post #8

If I could give a six word response for the technical side: "Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat and team". To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot remember, he said that the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and their team have time and time again managed to design and build st…

> To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot remember, he said that the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem.

You might actually be thinking of Jeff's Stanford talk from a few years ago (2011). Slide 21 of:

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

  Ensure your design works if scale changes by 10X or 20X
    but the right solution for X often not optimal for 100X
There's no attribution, but that is good advice I've kept with me throughout my career. Props to the original author (perhaps apocryphal at this point?).

Re: How did Google get so big?

#320

Post by dunpeal »

ebikelaw wrote: post #86
wallflower wrote: post #8

If I could give a six word response for the technical side: "Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat and team". To paraphrase some Cal/UC Berkeley professor that I cannot remember, he said that the problem with scaling is that when you go up a magnitude or more, you may need a qualitatively different solution for the same problem. Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat and their team have time and time again managed to design and build st…

That doesn't provide a perfect answer. Sanjay and Jeff (and a lot of other senior Googlers) were all at DEC. Why didn't DEC succeed to the degree that Google has?

And Softdisk had John Carmack and basically the entire original Id software team on their payroll. And Fairchild Semiconductors had the entire executive founding team of Intel, and Xeroc PARC had not only several key people but essentially the entire IP portfolio of modern computers, including some working prototypes...

"Success" is the result of a very large equation with many variables, and having (some of) the right people is only a few of them.

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