Saturday, January 13, 2007

Google Gospel


Larry Page and Sergey Brin these were the two at Stanford pursuing their PhD’s when they met and out of shear academic curiosity build a search engine which they didn’t knew would soon take over the world.

Google is here for world domination and it has acquired that place by doing one thing extremely well: search. Google was the only industry model to show that revenues were possible from search engine and now it seems the whole Silicon Valley research is all around the word “search engine” as if it’s the surest way of winning in the mammoth maze of internet jungle. Yahoo!, MSN search, Hakia, ChaCha are just some of the about 170 search engines launched recently all with a single aim : to bring out the mighty empire of Google. Let’s explore what makes Google grow, grow, grow.

Recently, web search companies were asked by U.S. intelligence agencies to transfer private data on user searches over to them; while other web search companies concurred with them, Google saw it as evil and denied. This decision alone drove Google’s shares dwindling down several points on the NASDAQ, but Google remained true to its “Do No Evil” maxim. Google has come to be seen as a company driven not by the incentive of making money, but rather by the pursuit of knowledge through technological innovation; as a result, the company has used this justification to convince its competitors that it is not interested in defeating competition, but rather providing easier access to information for everyone, and hence making the world a better place. Google keeps its business silent and only attracts attention to the technological goodies it has brought to the masses. In fact, Google’s Machiavellian tactics have worked so well that most of its users do not even know how or if Google makes money.

The another definite thing that separates Google from other firms is its non-corporate culture and fun atmosphere which generally prevails in the company and can be seen through Google’s holiday logos and the tricks which often appear on April fool’s day. Google engineers are definitely its main asset almost all of them are PhD’s (Including its CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt) Google has an office in India in Hyderabad (I’ve seen it ;-) ) with all of its employees being IIT ian Google has not been to any other campus except the IIT’S although there were reports that it will recruit this year from other campuses too. Google has an attrition rate of almost 0%. Google News is the product of Google’s Hyderabad office.

All Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20 percent (20%) of their work time on projects that interests them. Some of Google's newer services, such as Gmail, Google News and orkut, originated from these independent endeavors.

Google proposes an almost joyous antidote to mediocrity, a model for smart innovation in challenging times. "Google engineers are people who think they are creating something that's the best in the world," says Peter Norvig, a Google engineering director. "And that product is changing people's lives."

For a large company like Google, the hierarchy within the company is quite small. Google organizes employees in teams of three to five people. Each team is self directed, while the middle managers provide the required resources to support development within the teams. As a result, Google has fashioned a powerful self-directed decentralized approach towards product development. The consequence of such an arrangement is that there is no keystone employee or manager within the company. It is almost as if the company could run on its own even if it were divided into several smaller pieces.

Now Google search takes on average 0.2 seconds to complete your search through the billions of WebPages instead of the usual 3 seconds it usually took but for a Google engineer as long as the figure is greater than zero he won’t stop working and unless your search engine gives you the perfect answer to your query he won’t stop and Google won’t stop the company is poised for world domination and if the current pace continues nobody can stop it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You started from history but moved to technology but neglecting that the article's a masterpiece.