My name is David Nachum. I am an Associate Product Manager (APM) at Google, in Mountain View, California.

My name is David Nachum. I am an Associate Product Manager (APM) at Google, in Mountain View, California.

Hey, its realy nice to know that Google had no HTML knowledge, gives hope for everyone else. Thanks for the post!

Just stumbled upon this article, very interesting stuff. Regarding Google's UI, I am surprised about the "I'm feeling lucky" button, I would have thought that would have been the first thing to go if no body uses it. Usually less clutter = better, wonder what would happen if they kept adding more, e.g note their attempts to "cluttify" their Japanese offerings (whose market likes more, not less).

Really nice. All these facts were a great help to me so I could get something to wirte about on my project on Google. My teacher's gonna love this. And oh yeah, WAY TA GO GOOGLE!!!!

How about an extra Search Button where I get ALL the pages listed immediately instead of that I have to search again when getting the message "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 14 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included"

This pisses me off, that I have to go to the end of the search to be able to search for all pages.

Nice info.

Google will be always a winner!

This is an excellent summary. It makes me wish I had attended but also gives me enough information to feel amost as if I had. Thanks for this excellent post.

The engineer behind orkut: Orkut profile: http://www.orkut.com/Profile.aspx?uid=325082930226142255 Standford homepage: http://www.stanford.edu/~orkut

Thanks for echoing your conversation to us. I just knew all those things today Very informative...

Oh, please - to the women (and I guess there are some men who think they're doing women a favor by agreeing) who are offended by the comments of how attractive Ms. Mayer is - grow up. I'm a woman, and I will NEVER be offended if someone thinks I'm attractive, nor will I feel threatened when they think another woman is pretty...I guess you aren't, so that's why you're jealous...btw, plenty of women remark how attractive Sirgey is, and how unattractive Bill Gates is...doesn't seem to stop men from going into IT..

These are interesting comments about the how Google evolved in the past. If you are interested to see where things are going in the future you may want to come and hear Marissa Mayer addressing Google’s future when she speaks at Harvard Business School’s Technology conference, Cyberposium, on Nov 11.

John Shapiro Director of PR Cyberposium

>> The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn't know HTML and just wanted a quick interface

haha, that was funny ;)

I've always wondered why Marissa gets all the press and attention when there were a number of equally (and even more) talented people who made this a success. Because people think she has a cute face?

As we talk about the google engine so we shoul awareness about that

"They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6."

Okay, I'll bite... what are the 6 types?

Larry, look at me and tell the truth: Do you know HTML?

You guys wonder why more "HOT SEXY WOMEN" aren't in computer science. Duh. It's because instead of saying "wow, she must be really smart, look what she's accomplished, i really respect her" you say "wow, she's so hot (drool)." It makes for a very unpleasant atmosphere more than any of you know.

very interesting

Great article, Marissa is a great lady, I listened to her speech it was quite informative, Matt cutts is an other great guy with google

An interesting article regarding marissa dating with Larry page

Read here

interesting facts there

the last two points are completely true and I really respect your mind because you have a special way of thinking and that's why google chosed you for this good position because google don't need ordinary people .. google need people who can make change .. and I really respect google in this point because this leads him to a better way of providing services and I hope that google be always in the top of the internet and by the way I hope that you put the "ajax based suggest technology" as the google.com home page and thanks alot for all your efforts :) .

////The infamous "I feel lucky" is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.

This would be a perfect area to test new Search filtering Algos:

e.g. 1- a DateRange search option for new or Updated sites within a given time periods

2- a "Mindset" option similar to the Yahoo Mindset that would allow searchers to emphasize commercial or informational sites

3- Saved Search option so as to have a cached lists of the last 20 or so queries

Very interesting! Marissa Mayer is just 30, great work! Way to go!

really interesting facts!!!

These are really interesting facts to read.

This is interesting !! Some very cute facts in here... :)

good to know the facts, nice one

This is a very nice reporting of a talk. The subject of the talk itself is interesting. I dont understand why people comment on the "Hot babe". What is the interest of such people. They can go to some porn sites if they want and comment anything they want.. Please have some "decency" about a very nice report and also a very nice topic and talk.

Very cool. funny they didnt know html and look what it has grown into :) amazing!

Jeff - http://jeffeh.com

I'm still waiting for the page to load... ;)

I'm glad they can still keep it fast and simple. So many other websites feel that they have to pack it to the gills with useless stuff. Sounds like a fun place to work.

Really interesting to read. But I do hope this newness is not lost to time!!

Thanx for getting it together.

Good lesson in there about listening to your customers.

Thanks for the notes.

Interesting stuff. As far as #3 goes, I tend to use Google as my spellchecker when I don't have something else handy; Google's spellchecker is much better than the one at dictionary.com.

Did you know this post comes up number one on google for "adenoidal morlocks", it's geeks using phrases like this that gives men in the IT industry a bad name, not because we call nice looking ladies 'hot' that happens in every industry!

hee, they are no # 1, in search, you don't find keywords or description on any googles page, they make the rules and other follows... so they don't need any one of these shits... Btw good writeup :)

Saw you on Digg! Cool post!

-A

"They listen to feedback actively. Emailing Google isn't emailing a blackhole."

Hun...That was an interesting information...although not surprising but atleast assuring!

Now I gonna give loads of feedback to Google!

@Kutta , I kind of trust her . I`ve heard this before too . and from a trusted source .

lol, I did know about the Googol to google but the rest ! .

and they didn`t know HTML , ROFL !!

Sreejith

I like google and I also like their work style. Kudos to Marissa Mayer for revealing this titbit about google.

Ravi - http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com

Heh Heh Heh..Who is she kidding? Heh Heh Heh..So the Google founders didn't know HTML!! But they were somehow able to write code to scan millions of HTML pages and index them. This, Orkut, and googol makes it 3 bluffs out of 10. I wouldn't trust a thing she says anymore.

I must say a word in defense of those much maligned individuals who have expressed a simple appreciation for the physical characteristics of the lecturer in this case.

Surely we are able to observe and express opinions on matters such as these without facing the scorn and ridicule of others. Each of us makes judgements of this sort hundreds of times each day. Are not those who express these feelings (within the bounds of good taste) truer not only to themselves but to all of us? I propose that such honesty merits not condemnation, but rather applause.

Besides, you have to admit that she is SMOKIN'.

Captain

very interesting facts especially for google lovers.

veetrag [[email protected]]

Great interview by marissa mayer she is a great lady to have in a company,

Google reaching great heights already , All the best,

Googleer

Hi,

I have attended a talk by Marissa Mayer a few days ago which seems to have some things in common with the one discussed here.

In specific, she did mention a few details about the "6 types of email users". She did not describe in details which the 6 types are, but she gave an idea of the type of classification. In specific, she mentioned that one type of user reads every single email in his/her mailbox, labels it, and archives it immediately. Another type of user instead selectively reads messages a little at a time and keeps them all in the inbox.

Later on, she stated that when making UI decisions/changes, the team usually thinks of their impact on the different classes of users: adding a button to the top GMail bar, may improve some types of user, but add "clutter" for some other.

Flavio [[email protected]]

good topic

rwr [[email protected]]

yes. I agree me too jitender

jitender [[email protected]]

i think google does not show enough websites to keep us children very interested in these websites most of them are blocked by websense

kayleigh  [[email protected]]

I Think in nearest future GOOGLE will RUle the WOrld, and this is true;)

J. Poker-son

Someone wondered if one day there would be a book called "The google story." There already is something very close to it:

SEARCH ME : THE SURPRISING SUCCESS OF GOOGLE
Author: Taylor, Neil.
Published: London, UK Cyan 2005

BTW the comments about Ms. Mayer's person sound to me like they are coming from some fairly desperate types. Step away from your computers ...

A librarian lurker

She is a hot babe and smart too.

Daniel Hildoer [[email protected]]

I have made a translation of the article here

http://griho.udl.es/aipo/traducciones.jsp?id=4

enric naval

Steve here again. Wow! Where's me washboard ???

Steve Doble

Every poster who commented on the woman's looks needs to be sent to a basic conduct class.

Google has the largest network of translators in the world

Why wouldn't they be? They let everyone to be translators voluntarily and honor them too. But, Google also has the quality assurance team for that, trust me! Wrong translation can pop up, but people who notice it, will surely fix them.

cell-v

This article is so interesting because of the rich content about a well-known internet item never used as a topic for its interesting facts.It came in the right time by reason of internet users who use the Google nevertheless don't have any information of the item's history.

Cassio Turato Raggi [[email protected]]

>>very hotty

She may be hot, but she's dating Larry Page.

anon

Nice to let us know this.

Zé Monte

Thanks for great post. I myself am dying to find out what 6 types of e-mail users you are referring to.

Vlad

Very interesting info.
Besides the wonderful performance of Google, I have a soft corner for it bcoz 'Google' is so similar to my name!!

Googie

Nice article

Cesar

Thanks for the interesting post and also to 3ntropy for posting the link to the video.

I am a graduate student in Information Science and this has been really helpful.

Sayan

Sayan

Bernd,

Sorry for the delay, but I've added the references to my articles (ref: http://articles.milui.com/index.php?p=35). Some people say that a few is enough, others say it isn't. Have fun!

Alan J. Salmoni [[email protected]]

As the owner of Googol.com, I would like to just add a bit of background to the Googol/Google names. I am sure that there was many things that went into the two founders choosing the name they did. I have had the Googol.com domain for quite a few years, well before Google was even a search engine.

One evening, I got an email from the future founders of Google, saying that they were a couple Stanford Grad students and they were starting a search engine and they were wondering if they could buy my domain. My first though was that is sounded very much like something a couple other Stanford Grads had done (yahoo) and it sounded like they were a day late and a dollar short. I certainly did not intend on giving up googol.com for what I believed was a company that would never make it. I am glad to say, I was wrong about what they could do. What a great execution. In any case, they used Google instead and they have done a great job building what to date is a web revolution.

Congratulations to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Great job. The only part I don't like, is that my web site loads like a dog from all the people who come to my site first because they go to the correct spelling of Googol.

There is my piece of the name lore.

Tim Beauchamp
[email protected]

Tim Beauchamp [[email protected]]

intersting post...

sudheer

"She's not TOO bad looking, still, chicks + computers == cool. IT really needs more good looking ladies."

And people wonder why there are so few women in IT...

Roland

btw, how do users create links to their homepage?
I like Robs page!

mine is autoversicherung but I guess this doesnt work :(

btw, cool site! Had to register :)

WOW! I wonder if there will one day be a book called: "The google story" :)

autoversicherung [[email protected]]

Good Information. Thank you for providing

tilak [[email protected]]

Google rulz. If I have a child I will name it Google

Stephen Doble

That's interesting, I always assumed they had done extensive research and determined that a sparse search page would load fast and provide a unique experience.

Rob

imsogood!

hero >D

very hotty

kappe

They have the worlds largest network of translaters, no wonder they work great in practically any language and have so many language-specific features. I use Google for searching Chinese web pages all the time and it works great.

David Dewey

"Spooner: Tell me about your wife.
Hirst: What Wife?
Spooner: How beautiful she was, how tender and how true. Tell me with what speed she swung in the air, with what velocity she came off the wicket, whether she was responsive to finger spin, whether you could bowl a shooter with her, or an offbreak with a legbreak action. In other words, did she google?" Harold Pinter, "No Man's Land" - 1975

Pat McClung [[email protected]]

Very interesting

GYZ

Why does Microsoft archive competitor's talks?

MapPoint

Thanks for the post... interesting points.

John -- I heard that Orkut is the first name of the guy who developed it. If what you said is true, I feel sorry for him!

Julie

My favorites:
"Gmail was used internally for nearly 2years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6."
- Uhh, you still have to be invited to get an account. Apparently, "people who want an account" is not one of the 6 types of email users.

"They listen to feedback actively. Emailing Google isn't emailing a blackhole."
- Oh, you believed that line of BS, hmmm? You must go for the whole "don't be evil" crap, too.

http://news.google.com/news?q=david+drummond

My favorite headline: "Google Agrees To Stop Violating SEC Regs"

duh

She's not TOO bad looking, still, chicks + computers == cool. IT really needs more good looking ladies.

antivoid

Fascinating. Reminds me of a thesis written on magnetic pole reversal. All of which is accessible via Google.

Dr.Wong

yeah, speaking as one young, attractive, female IT professional - comments like that are a big part what gives the industry a bad name and keep women away. Grow up, you adenoidal morlocks.

anon

not sure why everyone is praising the posting....doesn't say ANYTHING new...orkut..is the biggest crapola..has everyone forgot about the scam that orkut Buyukkokten did! He evidently founded affinity engines..and then started working for google.. affinity engines sued google because most of Orkut was stolen code!

http://www.onlinebusinessnetworks.com/blog/2004/07/07/affinity-engines-sues-google-over-orkut-code

google is great 'n all...but alas..its still a very young company....right now theres way more buzz than fact..

Mr. Zeus

I went to the talk too, and unfortunately Marissa did not expand on the types of email users.

Philippe [[email protected]]

Google is such a great tool because of its integration with other search engines. Despite it's popularity, the only real drawback with providing such free access to global information is the fact that when context is omitted, you rapidly descend into a quagmire of syntactic versus semantic paradigm shifts (or in other words "knowledge" versus "information"). Obviously links beyond the 10th page of Google results are most likely to fuel the self-fulfilling prophecy of "garbage in - garbage out". This leads to the inescapable conclusion that protecting too many people from too much information can never really be a good thing.

Wally Masterson

You people are going to thank me for this:
her lecture:
http://murlup.research.microsoft.com/asfroot2/videos/stanford/cs547d/030117_OnDemand_100_100K_320x240.asf

enjoy

3ntropy [mr_3ntropy@yahoo]

two spelling corrections

it's "free rein" not "reign"
title should have an apostrophe " An evening with Google's Marissa Mayer"

anon

"Give Users What They Want When They Want It", oh yeah and XHTML (application/xhtml+xml) users or HTML standards evangelists users are not real user.

Yan Morin

> I wonder what features she actually came up with herself.

Found this at
http://www.nasvf.org/web/allpress.nsf/0/b09fe4fdb78cb4648625696500391cb6?OpenDocument

*--------
Perks of a Start-up

When Mayer and Jen McGrath, 23, decided in the summer that Google needed an advanced search function, they went to Page and Brin and got the go-ahead in a few hours.

The women started on a Friday, spent much of the weekend working, and by 7 p.m. Wednesday, the jazzed-up search function went live.

"This is a place where you can have an impact, and millions of people use what you create," Mayer said.
------------*

Vijay

"Orkut" actually is a plural form (there are multiple plural forms in Finnish) for "orkku" (orgasm), and it literally translates to "all of the orgasms". I leave it to the reader to find a use for such a word.

anonymous

She's very hot ...

Tim-E

"Orkut" isn't horribly obscene in Finnish. It's just a slangy short word for "orgasms" (singular: "orkku").

Someone who knows Finnish

Yes she is smoking hot! I would also like an evening with miss mayer and breakfast.

HERB

> Good summary.. and she's really hot! it's amazing to see
> girls (hot too) working with computers. hehe..

It's probably partly thanks to crude reactions like this from male geeks that more women aren't in IT. For God's sake, people, grow up and start treating your female peers as peers, not sex objects in glasses.

Jay

Why do people keep telling Alan he's hot? I can't find a picture anywhere..

Mr. Ummm

I have a Finnish acquaintance who advised me that "orkut" is a horrificly obscene word in Finnish. He will (sparingly) use the f-word but would never even consider using "orkut" (an anatomical reference).

John

me too!

another aol'er

> Research indicatest that just using small groups can result in many usability findings being missing.
Can you provide links to papers about that? I'ce often heard the opposit: A very small number of users is enough to find a large number of usability problems...
About the 6: I'd be interested, too.

Bernd

Good summary.. and she's really hot! it's amazing to see girls (hot too) working with computers. hehe..

Kmos

Is 'Googol' a word? I guess i'll google it.

Lyrics

"Orkut is very popular in Brazil."
Actually 70% of all members are brazilians.
Who want to be invited? hehe

Marcelo

Interesting: Like a lot of other respondents, I am interested in hearing about these 6 "types" of email users.

Also: I'm not so sure about the testing of small numbers of people. Research indicatest that just using small groups can result in many usability findings being missing. Triangulating a series of methods and more than one team can uncover a whole lot more. See my link for an article.

Alan J. Salmoni [[email protected]]

"10. The name 'Google' was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for 'Googol'"

Not quite the way I heard it. They _were_ going for "googol" (means ten to the one-hundreth power), because that was how many pages they aspired to index, but the reason they registered "google" was more fundamental than a spelling mistake: googol.com was already taken (as of 13-Apr-1995).

For the origin of the term "googol", see "Mathematics and the Imagination" by Kasner and Newman, first published in 1940 and still in print. For the Googol site, see http://googol.com/

(How come this form has no visible preview button, and no indication as to whether it handles HTML?)

Ted Powell [[email protected]]

Great post and a good read....

Susheel

Very interesting. She seems to be very smart and knowledgeable about the product. I wonder what features she actually came up with herself.

Anyway, from what I know the UI has all been contracted out to a design house to work on.

Suchin Pak

Quite interesting :-)

Te RETURN option is the best :-P

Jejeje

Alberto

Excellent post -- nicely done. I really wish I could've been there.

Here's an article I wrote about #6 a while back: The Quiet Death of the Major Relaunch

Visit me @ http://www.uie.com

I hope you could describe these 6 types of emails users 'cause i'm really interested about th e google's history

hezzuz

Hello,
Thanks for this very informative post which throws some light on the thinking at Google. I have always been fasinated by what google has been churning out. And reading this post has increased that fasination.

Ravi Kumar

Very cool.

dustin

Thanks for this compilation of insightful information about Google.

Mario

Wow, Intresting Facts, Indeed :)

mansoor

"They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6."

Okay, I'll bite... what are the 6 types?

Geno Z Heinlein [[email protected]]

She looks like Scarlett Johansson. [dreaming]can't you just see her in the opening scene?{/dreaming]

d_stew

Good read, and yes, she's a honey too :)

wobert

She's hot.

anon

Thanks for taking the time to put this up.

Mark

Very interesting :)

See what Amazon is doing related to the bullet #6.
http://robotics.stanford.edu/~ronnyk/emetricsAmazon.pdf

Gerald

Thanks for taking the time to share this. Great notes.

Warren Bare