That’s the title of a very interesting article (WSJ, March 29, 2004) about how Google is managed. One of my favorite parts: “…decisions are made in front of people. We don’t like people to go off and make a decision. We try to make decisions in as large a group as possible by as few people as possible.”
Tag Archives: google
Google IPO?
Plans are still in the early stages for the (Google) IPO, which could value the company at more than $15 billion.
Evan Williams on blogging
“The whole “do not be evil” thing, and sort of a democratic approach to how information should be distributed and available for us. We’re all about giving anyone a voice, and Google’s all about finding out what’s important on the Web by what people link to and what people say.”
— Evan Williams (C|Net’s News.com)
Google’s new News Alerts.
Google has invented another great tool: Google News Alerts, which are e-mailed to you when news articles appear online that match the topics you specify. Email news alerts aren’t new but what makes Google’s so powerful is that Google News trolls 4,500 news sources continuously throughout the day — and you can set the alert to send you links to related articles as soon as Google News find them. So if you’re writing about the debate over the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop, for example, you can set an alert to send you an e-mail as soon as any of 4,500 news sites posts an article containing the words “gay and bishop.”
Gnomedex: Google
Nelson Minor is a software engineer for Google and he gave a fascinating presentation to kick off this two day conference. Starting with the Google mission statement:
* Work on things that matter
* Affect everyone in the world
* Solve problems with algorithms
* Hire bright people and give them lots of freedom
* Don’t be afraid to try new things (According to Minor, Google News was the idea of one guy who said, “Hey, wouldn’t this be cool?”)
Average search time on Google: 1/5 of a second. He even explained how Google works…in a way that even I could sort of understand.