March 21, 2018 • 33 mins
From Youtube to Nest, Maps to Android, it's hard to imagine life without Google. But how did the web giant really get its start? Will and Mango travel back to the mid-90s to see how a horrible campus tour, some extra Lego bricks and a week at Burning Man all contributed to the making of Google. Also, the weird reason Larry Page didn't sell the company for $1.6 million when he got the chance (spoiler: it wasn't because the offer was too low!).
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Guess what, Mango, What's so the other day I was
thinking about our visit to the Google headquarters. You know,
this was several years ago. You remember this. Oh yeah,
that's when we tried to stump those employees, right, And so, listeners,
Mango and I were invited to speak to the employees
of Google after the release of one of our Mental
Flaws books. This was around the time where it felt
like everybody was talking about just how smart Google employees were,
(00:20):
you know, all these tests that they had to take
and everything they had to go through just to get hired.
And so we thought we'd put them to the test,
and we were sure we could stump them. We designed
the world's geekiest crossword puzzle. So to explain what this was,
we decided to not only create a really difficult cross word,
but we decided to hire an expert in constructed languages
and make all of the answers and constructed languages as well,
(00:43):
like Elvish and cling On and Esperanto. And we were
so cocky that we sent a message ahead of time
saying that anyone who finished the puzzle would win a
free subscription to Mental Flaws and a few gifts from
our online store. Well, not only were there more than
a dozen people who completed it, they were actually correct
thing are grammatical mistakes. Yeah, it's pretty great. And as
(01:03):
it turns out, that's not the only smart thing these
people have done. They've also built this little company called Google.
That's impressive. Yeah, and I guess it's pretty big now.
And uh, you know, we were curious about how they
managed to pull off this total dominance in the search
engine world. So today's show is all about the origins
of Google. Let's dive in. Hey their podcast listeners, Welcome
(01:43):
to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always
I'm joined by my good friend man guest Ticketer, and
on the other side of the soundproof glass one of
the half dozen people on the planet who still uses
dog pods his search engine of preference. That's our friend
and producer Tristan McNeil. I do respect him for this choice.
I know you just want those search results just dog
piled up, right. So I was thinking about search engines
(02:05):
a little bit. When you were in high school, did
your library have one of those like thick telephone books
of websites? Totally? I remember that was so ridiculous. Like
people actually thought that's how you search the web, Like
that's how you'd find a great history site or whatever,
and and you look up the page. But there's even
a magazine called Yahoo Internet. It was the most magas
told you about websites, like your websites you should go to. Yeah,
(02:28):
even like Roger Ebert was a contributor. I love that magazine. Anyway,
So I pulled some numbers for today's show, and according
to Statista, Google's worldwide market share amongst search engines roses
highs eighty nine percent last year. I know, so dominant.
And I was thinking about it. It's really hard to
name more than like five search engines five I know. Well,
(02:48):
I mean you can get like Google bing Yahoo, asked Jeeves.
That's still around, I think so. And then and then
you're just like grasping right like or or you're in
dead website territory like x it and Alta Vista. The
one of choice for me as a high schooler was
I think it was called web Crawler. Do you remember
that one? Yeah, tipe and web Crawler. I'm sure one
(03:08):
of the others bought it up. But anyway, well, for
all the Googlers out there, and there must be a
lot of you. Today's show is really for you. Now.
In past episodes, we've delved into the histories of iconic
companies like Amazon and Sears and Ikea, and so now
we're doing the same for Google, because while it may
be the world's most popular search engine and the second
most valuable brand this side of Apple, that hasn't always
(03:29):
been the case. So we want to take some time
to explore the early days of the company, and you know,
kind of trying to make sense of the business model
that propelled this link fetching startup from this rented garage
all the way to the five million square foot Google
Plex it calls home today. That's right. But before we
even get to the garage, we we need to talk
about a dorm room at Stanford University because that's really
(03:49):
where Google's story starts. So this is back and engineering
major from the University of Michigan named Larry Page was
just beginning his computer science PhD program at Stanford, and
he was searching for a topic for his thesis and
he kept coming back to the fairly new phenomena that
was the Internet. As an engineer, Page was interested in
the math behind it, and he actually recognized that each
(04:10):
web page was a point on a graph, and that
each link on a given page was a connection between
the points and this underlying structure he gave the Worldwide
Web it's form, and Page really wanted to understand it
from the inside out. All right, but you know, kind
of getting this group on the Internet's link structure seems
pretty far off from actually building your own search And
just so I'm curious, like, what's the line of thinking
that leads from one to the other. So you've got
(04:33):
to remember that Page was getting an early start on
his thesis, so he still had plenty of time to
find the final shape of his project. And one realization
that pointed him in the right direction was that the
Internet didn't provide a way to tell which websites were
linking to a given page. So, for example, if you
go on someone's tumbler page, right, you can follow links
from one page to another, but you can't actually tell
which sites link back to that person's tumbler. Is that true?
(04:56):
I have to admit I don't really use tumbler, And
so Page was annoyed. But yeah, so he thought it
was important to know who was linked to who man,
And while that might not be super interesting to most
of us, it actually makes a lot of sense why
it would be a concern for someone like him. I mean,
think about how important publishing is among academics. For math
and science scholars, especially, publishing research papers is a chief
(05:18):
way to make a name for yourself, and the only
thing that might get you more credibility is to be
cited as an authority in someone else's paper. And that's
because citations make up the backbone of academic papers. Like
you're always citing previously published research as evidence to back
up your points. So for the academic community, it's not
just the original content that determines the paper's worth, it's
also the citations in that paper and the number of
(05:39):
future papers that later cited. So the links are kind
of like a form of citations. As he's putting this
idea together, that's right. So in page his mind, the
whole Internet was more or less based on a citation system,
except that, unlike an academic publishing nobody was keeping track
of which pages were actually being cited by others. Okay,
so that it's it's starting to make sense here. So
in the academic world, if you saw that, you know,
(06:00):
like a chemistry professor's paper had been sighted by a
hundred other chemists, you could walk away from that being
fairly confident that it was an important paper. And so
what you're saying is Page wanted to find a way
to apply that kind of ranking system to the Internet
as a whole, exactly, and he figured that by counting
up the back links associate with every web page on
the Internet, you could actually determine the importance, or at
(06:21):
least the relative popularity of each one. And with that
goal in mind, project BackRub was born. You know, we've
talked about this fact before that that it was called
BackRub at first, But I don't think I actually know
how they came up with that, do you do? You
know why I was called that at first? I know,
I initially I thought they just had like a closet
full of masseuses. Actually it goes back to the idea
of retrieving and quantifying back links. So that would explain
(06:45):
the backpart. But but what about the rub I need
I need to know the rub man go why the rub? Well,
the program built for backroub was actually known as a
web crawler, because you know, like you're saying, it crawls
the whole Internet and he counts up links as it goes.
So I guess Backroub just sounded better than back roll.
I don't know. I mean they both found a little
crazy to me, so I'm kind of glad they ended
up changing names to it. But but maybe Larry Page
(07:06):
doesn't bear the full blame for that, because he actually
had a lot of help in bringing back rub to life. Right. Yeah,
So the other co founders for gay Brin also got
into the act around then too, and at the time
he was a second year grad student at Stanford's Computer
science department. He was ultimately the one who helped Page
figure out how to make use of a rock count
of links that Backgroub accumulated. So were these guys like
(07:27):
old friends. I'm curious how did Brand get involved? I mean,
did he just want to help out a friend, you know,
trying to start this project or not? Really? In fact,
for a while they were really antagonistic. And the two
had first met in the summer of nine. This is
when Page was visiting the Stanford campus as a prospect.
Then Britain was the tour guide and he took him
around and also showed him nearby San Francisco. But it
(07:47):
didn't actually go that well. So Britain Page argued the
entire time, really and they debated everything that came up
during the tour, and and they weren't shy about their
initial dislike for one another either. So there's this two
thousand and five I've interview with Wired, and in it,
Page says Serge is pretty social, he likes meeting people.
I thought it was pretty obnoxious. He had really strong
(08:08):
opinions about things, and I guess I did too. And
Brian's own account kind of just shows that the whole
feeling was mutual but maybe also not that serious. He said, quote,
we both found each other obnoxious, but we say it
a little bit jokingly. Obviously we spent a lot of
time talking to each other, so there was something there
and we kind of had a bantering thing going on.
Oh man, that's pretty interesting. So they were fast for enemies.
(08:30):
So after first impressions like that, like what made them
want to work together? Well, pages projects sound amazing and
this uh sort of made its way around campus and
Brin was actually attracted to the challenge. He'd already bounced
between a few different thesis topics of his own, but
none of them seemed half as interesting in light of
Backrupt And as Bryn put it, I talked to lots
of research groups and this was the most exciting project
(08:52):
because it tackled the web, which represents human knowledge, and
because I liked Larry. So see, they truly liked each other,
just like uh, Tommy Boy or Stepbrothers or any good
buddy comedy. Just like that. I mean, they definitely had
their work cut out for them, though, I mean crawling
the whole web. There's actually this site I've never heard
about until Gabe told us about it, but it's called
Worldwide Web Size dot com and it gives a daily
(09:15):
estimate of how big the Internet is. And today the
Internet contains at least four point four nine billion pages,
and these are the ones that we can see. So
it's a ton of links to count. Yeah, But but
to be fair, Backroub launched almost twenty five years ago
and the Web was only made up of about ten
million documents back then, which you know, don't get me wrong,
there's still an insane amount of links between those pages.
(09:37):
But you've got to remember Page and Britain weren't just
trying to count all those links. They were actually looking
for a way to rank the pages being linked to,
But but ranked by what? Like earlier you mentioned ranking
pages by importance, But what what makes one web page
more important than another? Sure? So the pair's ranking system
was designed to favorite links that came from important sources
while downplaying those that didn't. So, for example, there are
(10:00):
all kinds of different sites that link to Amazon, and
some of those links might come from business partners like
Whole Foods, but others just come from random people like
I don't know, like a teenager who's sharing gift ideas
on his blog. And from most people's point of view,
the business partner would be the more important link. Right.
That makes sense, But to an extent, it still feels
like a pretty human centric judgment call on this. I mean,
(10:21):
how would search engine know how to prioritize the company's
business partners over just their customers. Well, it wouldn't unless
you were able to translate that human measure of importance
into a set of criteria could recognize. And this is
really where page and Brand's biggest innovation comes in. It's
this algorithm known as page rank, and yeah, it is
actually named after page himself, and using this algorithm, BackRub
(10:43):
was actually able to keep track of both the number
of links into a particular site and the number of
links into each of those linking sites. So, to go
back to the Amazon example, like, imagine that only a
few other sites linked to the teenagers blog in a friends, family, whatever.
Since most of the sites that linked to his are
likely personal as well, they probably don't have many sites
linking to them either. But on the other hand, there
(11:04):
are thousands of sites that linked to Whole Foods, and
plenty of those sites also have thousands of sites linking
to them, So page rank would recognize this distinction and
deemed the Whole food site more important than the Teenagers
site with respect to Amazon at least. All right, so
it's importance by way of popularity. Then, you know, it's
also not a perfect system, but it's definitely pretty ingenious
(11:25):
the way they came up with this, And I'm also
guessing it didn't take long for Page and Brand to
realize these page rankings could make for a pretty incredible
search engine. Yeah not at Also, they quickly found the
backrupt delivered better results than you know, any other search
engine out there, and because engines like Alta, Vista and exite.
We're only pulling in ranking sites based on giving keywords.
(11:46):
You could get linked to sites that really weren't that
authoritative or useful. They didn't have that secret weapon of
a link counting algorithm like page rank. But Page and
Britain search engine wasn't just superior at the time. Its
design meant that it would only get better and better
the bigger the Internet grew, and as more pages and
links were added to the web, the BackRub engine scaled
accordingly and was made to become more accurate. I mean,
(12:09):
it was a phenomenal design and it's actually from this
infinite scalability that we get the name Google. The founders
chose to play it as a word on Google, which
is uh the term for the number one followed by
a hundred zeros. I mean, honestly, anything is better than
the name BackRub. So good choice there. But all right,
so they have a name, they have a working engine,
(12:29):
but you know, complexity aside. This is still a school project, right, like,
it's not a business at this point. Yeah. So the
first version of Google was actually released as a feature
on the Stanford website in August of nineties, which by
the way, was only one year after Page and Brand
first met and, as we said, immediately hated each other.
And wait, now that we've covered Google and how it
got it start, let's talk a little bit about it
(12:50):
that made the transition to you know, a proper company. Sure,
but before we do, let's take a quick break. You're
listening to part Time Genius and we're talking about how
(13:10):
Google became the go to source for information on well
just about everything. Okay, So, by the fall of ninety six,
Larry Page and Serge Brand knew they had to hit
on their hands, but they weren't sure if they were
ready for all the responsibilities and headaches that come with
starting and running a business. I mean, doing so would
mean leaving Stanford early without graduating, and that was a
(13:31):
tough pill to swallow given their academic backgrounds. Or they
obviously went for it anyway. So so what caused them
to change their minds? Ultimately They're big push came from
Brian's college advisor, offering a bit of perspective. He said, uh, look,
if this Google thing pans out, then great, If not,
you can return to graduate school and finish your thesis.
And that seems sensible enough to brin. So he said, yeah, okay,
(13:52):
why not, I'll just give it a try. I love
how nonchalant this whole thing was. Like, I know they
can't know then what they know now, but just think,
get this idea of like, okay, like ditch school and
start a multibillion dollar tech company. You want to do it? Okay?
I mean there actually was a little hesitation in there.
Apparently they brought the idea to Excite and asked them
to buy it for one point six million dollars one
(14:12):
point six million, I know, And and there was actually
a discussion they had it In the story I read,
it was really more Larry Page trying to sell the idea.
But he said he'd stay with Excite for like a
few months, and then he wanted to return to school.
But the CEO of Excite said BackRub was actually too
effective and it would actually drive people off the site
too quickly, like he wanted to slow it down to
(14:33):
its speed, just to make sure that the customers stayed
on the search engine and looked at display ads. And
then like the talks broke down from there, and and weirdly,
like while there's talk of conversation for page in those discussions,
there's actually no mention of Britain, at least that's what
business insiders reporting in the memos showed. That is so strange,
all right, So they took their professor's advice. They moved
(14:54):
out of the dorm room and the Google's first office
you know, which, as we mentioned, was actually just a
garage and the suburbs of I think was Menlo Park, California.
You know. This is August of and shortly after that,
the duo received an investment I think it was a
hundred thousand dollars and this was from the co founder
of Sun Microsystems. This was actually a pretty risky move.
I mean, Google wasn't even incorporated as this legitimate company yet,
(15:17):
so they were forking over a good bit of money
for this unproven private enterprise just a couple of college dropouts.
I mean, it's definitely not a safe bet. Yeah, So
I read that their first investment check was actually made
out to Google, Inc. Which, as you said, didn't exist yet.
So Patroon Brent figured, hey, now might be a good
time to incorporate, and so they did. Wow. Of course
(15:37):
that investment paid off for everyone in the end. In fact,
we talked about the garage that they rented that was
from somebody named Susan W. Jicki And and she went
on to become the marketing manager for Google, and I
think she was their sixteenth employee. Well today she's the
CEO of YouTube. That's awesome. And I know from our
Amazon episode that all kinds of eccentric business practices and
cost saving measures crop up during the garage based days
(16:00):
of these giant companies. So like you remember the bell
Amazon employees would ring whenever they made a sale, or
those makeshift desks they called together from old doors. Did
do you come across anything like that for Google? Oh definitely,
I mean there's there's a bunch of examples. But you
know how companies use these big server racks and cabinets
to to keep you know, like they're all their computing
power and everything. Well, the rat Google started with was
(16:20):
built entirely from legos. This was actually a pretty smart move.
You know, they were pretty cash strapped and it helped
them expand along the way as long as they had
some you know, extra bricks lying around. But actually the
most famous bit of a reverence is probably the rotating
assortment of those Google doodles that show up on the
site's landing page. And believe it or not, they also
got their start in Susan's garage. I didn't realize they
(16:42):
went back that far. According to Public Radio International, they're
well over four thousand different Google doodles today, but the
very first one dates back to August thirty. N Now,
all the stress from their impending in corporation was really
starting to get to the guys, so before they even
finished all the necessary pay or work, they decided to
spend a week of the Nevada Desert at the annual
(17:03):
burning Man Festival. Serious. Yeah, it's so funny because, like
you'd think of it as a thing now where like
over Norquist is going and all these c t O
s I like have to show up. But this was
twenty years ago. I know, it's pretty wild. So so
they just had a vision for the doodle out and
the fly off. Well, no, the first toodle actually came
in the form of this out of office message that
page and brand added to the company's homepage before they
(17:25):
headed out to the desert. I guess they weren't planning
to spend a lot of time in their computer at
Burring man, but you know, appropriately enough. They decided to
use that burning man logo just a little stick figure guy,
and they placed it behind the second oh in Google,
and the guys liked the idea of decorating the company
logo as a way to mark notable events, and so
much so. In fact, two years later, the founders asked
(17:46):
one of their interns to drop up a doodle for
Best Deal Day. I love that this was the next
one that they decided. But the result was a hit,
so Page and Brand requested more and then promoted the
intern to the rank of chief Doodler. I feel like
his parents must have been so proud. Well, I mean,
I don't know how proud they were then, but they
definitely should be now. So the guy's name is Dennis Wang,
(18:06):
and I know when we visited Google, that was probably
the most excited we got. We were like, dude that
I think we even took a picture that was pretty awesome. Well,
in addition to cranking out about fifty doodles per years
since two thousand, he actually later became the company's international
webmaster too. That's pretty amazing, And I do love how
that seems to be a theme with these guys. Like
(18:28):
the woman who read them her garage became one of
their c e o s. And the guy who made
the funny drawings was put in charge of all their
international content. You know, it's pretty cool. And obviously they've
won lots of awards for employee satisfaction. You know. It
was funny when when we went out to the Google campus,
which was you know, forever ago, it just seemed like
such a dream place to work. Like they did your laundry,
(18:49):
people had their dogs with them. There were these like
free T shirt bins that everyone was so excited about,
like rationally excited about. And I remember it was sunny
and there were just people on the green with their
tops working, but then they'd seven into like a set
of volleyball that was going on. It was it was
phenomenal to see, like I'd heard all these things about Google,
but seeing it is completely different. Yeah. Well, since you're
(19:11):
bringing up Google's more benevolent aspects, I mean, why don't
we talk a little bit about the guiding philosophies that
that that kind of took shape during those early years
of the company. Because it was around this time that
Google laid out both its mission statement and that mission
statement is quote to organize the world's information and make
it universally accessible and useful. And then its official motto,
which used to be don't be evil, right and and
(19:35):
I mean the company kind of downplays that model more
and more over time, not that I think they're pro
evil now. Well, you know, for a good long while
Google seemed to take the mantra pretty seriously, and it
was actually a big part of the founders two thousand
four letter when they were announcing that Google was going public.
And those three little words. I mean that there's still
the cornerstone of the company's code of conduct if you
(19:55):
were to go look it up. So I am curious
who actually came up with mono was a page or
in uh, you know, it might not have been either
one of them, although both of them took to it
pretty quickly, and and the real origin of the phrases
is still somewhat disputed, but the best guest credits the
inspiration to Paul Bouchette, who was the engineer who created Gmail. Now,
in his mind, the motto was quote a bit of
(20:17):
a jab at a lot of other companies, especially our competitors,
who at the time, in our opinion, we're kind of
exploiting the users to some extent, which is a little
bit too be funny to hear, given what they do
with everything. But you know, Google wanted to set itself apart,
and most of the higher ups agreed the best way
of doing so was just to not be evil, which
is interesting because like, what does it really mean? I mean,
(20:40):
it seems like, just like with that question of how
to define the importance of a web page, there isn't
actually like a single clear cut definition for evil. Yeah,
it's true, but you know, if you look at some
of the reports that that have come out about this,
that there there was actually this interesting interview that Eric
Schmidt did with Wait Wait, Don't tell Me, and I
remember hearing him on the program that time, and he
was blaming the motto and he said, the idea is
(21:02):
that we don't quite know what evil is, but if
we have a rule that says don't be evil, then
the employees can say, I think that's evil. So now,
when I showed up, I thought this was the stupidest
rule ever, because there's no book about evil except maybe
you know, the Bible or something. So what happens is
I'm sitting in this meeting and we're having a debate
about an advertising product, and one of the engineers pounds
(21:22):
his fists on the table and says, that's evil, And
then the whole conversation stops. Everyone goes into connections, and
eventually we stopped the project. So it did work well.
I mean, I do love that story. And I know
we can get hung up on whether Google is always
behaving ethically, but I also kind of like that it's
just this looming guideline. Yeah, and I don't want to
get too philosophical here, but we should talk a little
(21:44):
bit more about what evil might be and and how
Google actually makes its money. But first let's take a
quick break. Okay, Well, so give it to me straight.
(22:05):
How evil is Google? Like? Are they lex core people?
Are are they more like that company from Alien that's
like constantly getting its employees killed by Alien? So those
are my two options there. I'm not so sure on
that one. Now. Recently, there's been a bit of a
love hate relationship between Google and the general public, and
I think about all the half hearted jokes you hear
(22:25):
about Google and them taking over the world, or the
way we assume and kind of accept that the company
is keeping tabs on what we do online and probably
knows everything there is to know about us. You know,
we we we did an episode I guess a couple
of months ago about how much the Internet knows about us,
and some of that was a little bit troubling, I
have to admit. And you know, the truth is that
folks are right to be somewhat wary of any company
(22:47):
that gathers data on you and then uses it to
turn a profit, right, which is something Google definitely does,
but you know, it's not alone. Movie passes model is
also based on this, and everyone's tracking our data now,
and I do think those people are at least dimly
aware that Google keeps track of where you are and
what you use its services for and and then it
uses that info to generate targeted ads. But what people
(23:09):
might not know is that this kind of advertising is
actually the most profitable part of the whole company. Yeah,
and I feel like that's kind of an open secret, though,
don't you. I mean, if you really stop to think
about it, all of Google services don't cost anything. You've
got the search engine and the web brows or the
email service, all the various apps. But you know, the
old saying goes, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
And you know, in Google's case, the unspoken cost, I
(23:32):
guess is our privacy. Yeah, but which is really weird
to think about, because like then you can kind of
make the case that we're actually the product that Google
is selling to its real customers, which you know, from
that point of view, all that handy free services that
they offer are just really incentives to get us on
board with being sold. Yeah. Well, why don't we talk
a little bit about when Google got into the ad game,
(23:53):
and I mean, I would have to think that was
a huge turning point for the company. It was, Yeah,
because for the first three years that are incorporated, Google
really wasn't making much money, you know, despite having the
best search engine in town. But that all changed in
two thousand when Google launched AdWords. So this was the
company's first venture beyond its search engine. It was an
automated paper click ad auction platform, and with Google's ability
(24:17):
to tailor the ads sold to specific users based on
their search preferences, the company was able to corner the
market and digital advertising for what's coming up on I
guess two decades now plus you know, all that income
in cash allowed Google to invest in new services like Gmail, Blogger,
Google Maps, YouTube, and in turn, each of these services
provided its own new stream of ad driven revenue. Well,
(24:39):
it's obviously really smart. And you said the AdWords platform
that works with all these services. I mean, that's where
Google's profits really come from. So how much are we
talking about? Exactly? So in two thousand seventeen, AdWords accounted
for ninety five point four billion dollars of Google's total
revenue that year, of their total revenue, which was what
about a d billion? Good lord, I mean that's the
(25:01):
difference of around fifteen billion dollars between those two. And
we say a lot of things are insane on the show,
but drawing basically a hundred billion dollars from advertising a loan, Yeah,
that's insane. That counts more insane than cats, right, yeah,
I guess, I mean I don't know. Well, so you
know what else is crazy? Is that? Uh? That Eric
Schmigay who quitted earlier, the CEO who thought don't be
(25:23):
Evil was a stupid idea. He was a big supporter
of Google going all in on ad driven revenue and
pretty much all of Google's services, the ones we mentioned
are are came about on his watch. So he stepped
down from his exact role last December and favor of
a more advisory role with the company. But after steering
the ship for the last seventeen years, his fingerprints and
business eat those are all over Google. Well, there's definitely
(25:46):
a lot to talk about on the privacy front. But
one of the other things that that many people might
find a little bit troubling, and it's something that people
have been talking about in terms of, you know, what
the Internet knows about us for years now, is that
by providing instant, unfettered act says to information about literally everything,
the Internet is actually retraining our brains to act more
like high speed data processors and less like tools for
(26:09):
careful contemplation. And I mean, i'd say that's a valid
concern for sure, but maybe it's not fair to pin
something like that entirely on Google. Like everything in moderation, right,
And if we take advantage of these services to the
point that we impair our own thinking or decrease our
attention spans, that's kind of on us, you know, sure,
But to an extent, I mean, there's also reason to
(26:31):
think that companies like Google and Facebook are are maybe
exacerbating the problem on purpose. I actually came across this
old Atlantic article from two thousand eight, and it pointed
out just how much this brain reprogramming is really in
the best interest of Google and all these other data
farming companies. The author is Nicholas car and he writes, quote,
the faster we surf across the web, the more links
(26:51):
we click and pages we view, the more opportunities Google
and other companies gained to collect information about us and
to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietor RUMs of
the commercial Internet have a financial steak in collecting the
crumbs of data we leave behind as we flip from
link to link. The more crumbs, the better. The last
thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or
(27:12):
slow concentrated thought. It's in their economic interest to drive
us to distraction, That's what he said. But so Silicon
Valley companies are going to say things like, you know,
do no evil, or have these grand mission statements about
bettering the world. It does only seem fair to hold
the company's feet to the fire a little bit when
it fails to live up to these kinds of statements.
And you know, I'd say that encouraging that kind of
(27:33):
thoughtless thinking if it makes any sense, you know, for
the sake of profit, kind of qualifies as one of
those cases. Well, I mean that that is very smart.
And on that note, I want to mention this is
a way to avoid bias. All of the research for
today's program was conducted exclusively through bing. There's no ways true.
It definitely wasn't true. That's not true. But you know
(27:54):
what true every single fact in this fact. So let's
get started, all right. We'll to put a bit of
perspective around just how much traffic is driven by Google.
Consider the fact that back in August of two thout,
(28:16):
Google had a power outage for all of about five minutes.
But during that time, everything from its search engine, to
YouTube to Google Drive, we're all down. And during that
five minute period, web traffic around the world plummeted. Bye.
So earlier we talked about the whole constructed languages crossroad
(28:36):
puzzle that we made. So do you know that you
can actually select Swedish chef as a preferred language in Google?
Did not? It's called work, work, work, and you can
also choose cling on take Latin Pirate and Elmer Fud,
among others. I'm really hoping our college friend John is
not listening today's episode since he always liked to talk
in a work work work, all right, Well, when we visited,
(28:57):
I know, we were blown away by all the perks
and the free food and everything else at Google, But
you know, reading about some of the employee benefits is
pretty interesting too. Apparently they have these unbelievable death benefits.
I know that's kind of a funny phrase to say,
but if an employee dies, their partner actually gets half
of the deceased employee salary for a decade, and the
kids of that employee get a thousand dollars a month
(29:19):
until they're nineteen, or actually until twenty three if they're
in school full time. And that's really stunning. So have
you heard about this flying taxi startup that Larry Pages
behind the company is called Kittie Hawk, and they recently
had to reveal for this thing. It's an autonomous air
taxi named Cora. Two people can actually ride in it.
It takes off with these rotors that are on the wings,
(29:40):
you know, like a helicopter, but then it just flies
like a plane. So it doesn't really need a runway.
They've been doing some secret test flights in New Zealand,
where we like to do all our testing for our
secret project. I don't want people to know that, and
in fact that they've been working with the government there
in New Zealand to get a whole fleet to these
ready to release. So how far and and and how
fast can these things go? They can apparently travel for
(30:02):
a little over sixty miles at about a hundred ten
miles per hour. They travel at about three thousand feet elevation,
and I'll definitely be interested to see what happens with these.
I might give it a little bit of time before
I happened. I think I'm gonna give it more than
a little bit of time. But it is really interesting alright. Well,
on a lighter note, I always look forward to seeing
what Google is up to on April Fool's Day. Their
pranks are always pretty funny, you know, from the Google
(30:24):
UK and Google Australia sites. Rick rolling every featured video
back in two thousand and that's a real commitments giving
us some serious ad revenue there to the Auto Awesome
for Resumes project, where you could take a boring resume,
and it would add emojis and animation, you know, to
make it more exciting. I wonder if anybody used it
and then submitted those resumes. But I think some of
my favorites are the fake food and drink products they've launched,
(30:46):
Like they had one called Google Gulp, which came in
these delicious flavors like sugar free, radical and Beta charity
and and it was quote designed to maximize your surfing
efficiency by making you more intelligent and less thirsty. Then
there was also the Google Fiber Bar, which they announced
by saying, as we started thinking about fiber, we realized
(31:06):
that there hadn't been real innovation in the world of
fiber in a very long time. It's kind of a
shame these things weren't real, I know. So I recently
read a story that the details of the acquisition of
YouTube were negotiated at a Denny's over a delicious safotazer
of Mozzarelli's at it. Yeah, so the YouTube co founder,
Stephen Chen said, quote, we didn't want to meet at offices,
(31:28):
so we were like, where's the place none of us
would go to. I'm guessing the one point six five
billion dollar deal was probably the biggest deal ever negotiated
at a Denny's. But you know what's weird. At that
time that amount of money seemed huge. I mean, I
guess it still sounds huge, but we're talking for YouTube. Yeah,
that is kind of crazy. You would think it would
have been sold for much much more. But you know,
the only thing that would have made an even better
(31:50):
fact would benefit deal had been negotiated over a plate
of moons over my family, don't you think? Definitely? But
the fact that you've successfully gotten meat or reference moons
over my hammy, Mango, I think it means I've got
to give you this fact offico congratulation. Thank you so much.
Thank you guys for listening. If we've forgotten any great
facts about Google or the Internet in general, we'd love
to hear from you. As always, you can email us
(32:12):
part time genius at how stuff works dot com or
call us on our seven fact hot line one eight
four four pt Genius Health. Can they reach us, Mango, Well,
they can reach us through email, Twitter, all all sorts
of ways. But there's one more fact I wanted to mention. Uh,
today's Gabe's birthday. Oh, happy birthday, Game, Happy birthday Gave
and if you want to send Gave a message, just
(32:33):
put on our Facebook and we'll a forward it to him. Awesome. Well,
thank you guys for listening. Thanks again for listening. Part
Time Genius is a production of how stuff works and
(32:54):
wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the
important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Christa McNeil
does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song
and does the mixy mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland does
the exact producer thing. Gave Lousier is our lead researcher,
with support from the Research Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan
Brown and Lucas Adams and Eves Jeff Cook gets the
show to your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like
(33:16):
what you heard, we hope you'll subscribe, And if you
really really like what you've heard, maybe you could leave
a good review for us. Do we do? We forget
Jason Jason who
Guess what, Mango, What's so the other day I was
thinking about our visit to the Google headquarters. You know,
this was several years ago. You remember this. Oh yeah,
that's when we tried to stump those employees, right, And so, listeners,
Mango and I were invited to speak to the employees
of Google after the release of one of our Mental
Flaws books. This was around the time where it felt
like everybody was talking about just how smart Google employees were,
(00:20):
you know, all these tests that they had to take
and everything they had to go through just to get hired.
And so we thought we'd put them to the test,
and we were sure we could stump them. We designed
the world's geekiest crossword puzzle. So to explain what this was,
we decided to not only create a really difficult cross word,
but we decided to hire an expert in constructed languages
and make all of the answers and constructed languages as well,
(00:43):
like Elvish and cling On and Esperanto. And we were
so cocky that we sent a message ahead of time
saying that anyone who finished the puzzle would win a
free subscription to Mental Flaws and a few gifts from
our online store. Well, not only were there more than
a dozen people who completed it, they were actually correct
thing are grammatical mistakes. Yeah, it's pretty great. And as
(01:03):
it turns out, that's not the only smart thing these
people have done. They've also built this little company called Google.
That's impressive. Yeah, and I guess it's pretty big now.
And uh, you know, we were curious about how they
managed to pull off this total dominance in the search
engine world. So today's show is all about the origins
of Google. Let's dive in. Hey their podcast listeners, Welcome
(01:43):
to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always
I'm joined by my good friend man guest Ticketer, and
on the other side of the soundproof glass one of
the half dozen people on the planet who still uses
dog pods his search engine of preference. That's our friend
and producer Tristan McNeil. I do respect him for this choice.
I know you just want those search results just dog
piled up, right. So I was thinking about search engines
(02:05):
a little bit. When you were in high school, did
your library have one of those like thick telephone books
of websites? Totally? I remember that was so ridiculous. Like
people actually thought that's how you search the web, Like
that's how you'd find a great history site or whatever,
and and you look up the page. But there's even
a magazine called Yahoo Internet. It was the most magas
told you about websites, like your websites you should go to. Yeah,
(02:28):
even like Roger Ebert was a contributor. I love that magazine. Anyway,
So I pulled some numbers for today's show, and according
to Statista, Google's worldwide market share amongst search engines roses
highs eighty nine percent last year. I know, so dominant.
And I was thinking about it. It's really hard to
name more than like five search engines five I know. Well,
(02:48):
I mean you can get like Google bing Yahoo, asked Jeeves.
That's still around, I think so. And then and then
you're just like grasping right like or or you're in
dead website territory like x it and Alta Vista. The
one of choice for me as a high schooler was
I think it was called web Crawler. Do you remember
that one? Yeah, tipe and web Crawler. I'm sure one
(03:08):
of the others bought it up. But anyway, well, for
all the Googlers out there, and there must be a
lot of you. Today's show is really for you. Now.
In past episodes, we've delved into the histories of iconic
companies like Amazon and Sears and Ikea, and so now
we're doing the same for Google, because while it may
be the world's most popular search engine and the second
most valuable brand this side of Apple, that hasn't always
(03:29):
been the case. So we want to take some time
to explore the early days of the company, and you know,
kind of trying to make sense of the business model
that propelled this link fetching startup from this rented garage
all the way to the five million square foot Google
Plex it calls home today. That's right. But before we
even get to the garage, we we need to talk
about a dorm room at Stanford University because that's really
(03:49):
where Google's story starts. So this is back and engineering
major from the University of Michigan named Larry Page was
just beginning his computer science PhD program at Stanford, and
he was searching for a topic for his thesis and
he kept coming back to the fairly new phenomena that
was the Internet. As an engineer, Page was interested in
the math behind it, and he actually recognized that each
(04:10):
web page was a point on a graph, and that
each link on a given page was a connection between
the points and this underlying structure he gave the Worldwide
Web it's form, and Page really wanted to understand it
from the inside out. All right, but you know, kind
of getting this group on the Internet's link structure seems
pretty far off from actually building your own search And
just so I'm curious, like, what's the line of thinking
that leads from one to the other. So you've got
(04:33):
to remember that Page was getting an early start on
his thesis, so he still had plenty of time to
find the final shape of his project. And one realization
that pointed him in the right direction was that the
Internet didn't provide a way to tell which websites were
linking to a given page. So, for example, if you
go on someone's tumbler page, right, you can follow links
from one page to another, but you can't actually tell
which sites link back to that person's tumbler. Is that true?
(04:56):
I have to admit I don't really use tumbler, And
so Page was annoyed. But yeah, so he thought it
was important to know who was linked to who man,
And while that might not be super interesting to most
of us, it actually makes a lot of sense why
it would be a concern for someone like him. I mean,
think about how important publishing is among academics. For math
and science scholars, especially, publishing research papers is a chief
(05:18):
way to make a name for yourself, and the only
thing that might get you more credibility is to be
cited as an authority in someone else's paper. And that's
because citations make up the backbone of academic papers. Like
you're always citing previously published research as evidence to back
up your points. So for the academic community, it's not
just the original content that determines the paper's worth, it's
also the citations in that paper and the number of
(05:39):
future papers that later cited. So the links are kind
of like a form of citations. As he's putting this
idea together, that's right. So in page his mind, the
whole Internet was more or less based on a citation system,
except that, unlike an academic publishing nobody was keeping track
of which pages were actually being cited by others. Okay,
so that it's it's starting to make sense here. So
in the academic world, if you saw that, you know,
(06:00):
like a chemistry professor's paper had been sighted by a
hundred other chemists, you could walk away from that being
fairly confident that it was an important paper. And so
what you're saying is Page wanted to find a way
to apply that kind of ranking system to the Internet
as a whole, exactly, and he figured that by counting
up the back links associate with every web page on
the Internet, you could actually determine the importance, or at
(06:21):
least the relative popularity of each one. And with that
goal in mind, project BackRub was born. You know, we've
talked about this fact before that that it was called
BackRub at first, But I don't think I actually know
how they came up with that, do you do? You
know why I was called that at first? I know,
I initially I thought they just had like a closet
full of masseuses. Actually it goes back to the idea
of retrieving and quantifying back links. So that would explain
(06:45):
the backpart. But but what about the rub I need
I need to know the rub man go why the rub? Well,
the program built for backroub was actually known as a
web crawler, because you know, like you're saying, it crawls
the whole Internet and he counts up links as it goes.
So I guess Backroub just sounded better than back roll.
I don't know. I mean they both found a little
crazy to me, so I'm kind of glad they ended
up changing names to it. But but maybe Larry Page
(07:06):
doesn't bear the full blame for that, because he actually
had a lot of help in bringing back rub to life. Right. Yeah,
So the other co founders for gay Brin also got
into the act around then too, and at the time
he was a second year grad student at Stanford's Computer
science department. He was ultimately the one who helped Page
figure out how to make use of a rock count
of links that Backgroub accumulated. So were these guys like
(07:27):
old friends. I'm curious how did Brand get involved? I mean,
did he just want to help out a friend, you know,
trying to start this project or not? Really? In fact,
for a while they were really antagonistic. And the two
had first met in the summer of nine. This is
when Page was visiting the Stanford campus as a prospect.
Then Britain was the tour guide and he took him
around and also showed him nearby San Francisco. But it
(07:47):
didn't actually go that well. So Britain Page argued the
entire time, really and they debated everything that came up
during the tour, and and they weren't shy about their
initial dislike for one another either. So there's this two
thousand and five I've interview with Wired, and in it,
Page says Serge is pretty social, he likes meeting people.
I thought it was pretty obnoxious. He had really strong
(08:08):
opinions about things, and I guess I did too. And
Brian's own account kind of just shows that the whole
feeling was mutual but maybe also not that serious. He said, quote,
we both found each other obnoxious, but we say it
a little bit jokingly. Obviously we spent a lot of
time talking to each other, so there was something there
and we kind of had a bantering thing going on.
Oh man, that's pretty interesting. So they were fast for enemies.
(08:30):
So after first impressions like that, like what made them
want to work together? Well, pages projects sound amazing and
this uh sort of made its way around campus and
Brin was actually attracted to the challenge. He'd already bounced
between a few different thesis topics of his own, but
none of them seemed half as interesting in light of
Backrupt And as Bryn put it, I talked to lots
of research groups and this was the most exciting project
(08:52):
because it tackled the web, which represents human knowledge, and
because I liked Larry. So see, they truly liked each other,
just like uh, Tommy Boy or Stepbrothers or any good
buddy comedy. Just like that. I mean, they definitely had
their work cut out for them, though, I mean crawling
the whole web. There's actually this site I've never heard
about until Gabe told us about it, but it's called
Worldwide Web Size dot com and it gives a daily
(09:15):
estimate of how big the Internet is. And today the
Internet contains at least four point four nine billion pages,
and these are the ones that we can see. So
it's a ton of links to count. Yeah, But but
to be fair, Backroub launched almost twenty five years ago
and the Web was only made up of about ten
million documents back then, which you know, don't get me wrong,
there's still an insane amount of links between those pages.
(09:37):
But you've got to remember Page and Britain weren't just
trying to count all those links. They were actually looking
for a way to rank the pages being linked to,
But but ranked by what? Like earlier you mentioned ranking
pages by importance, But what what makes one web page
more important than another? Sure? So the pair's ranking system
was designed to favorite links that came from important sources
while downplaying those that didn't. So, for example, there are
(10:00):
all kinds of different sites that link to Amazon, and
some of those links might come from business partners like
Whole Foods, but others just come from random people like
I don't know, like a teenager who's sharing gift ideas
on his blog. And from most people's point of view,
the business partner would be the more important link. Right.
That makes sense, But to an extent, it still feels
like a pretty human centric judgment call on this. I mean,
(10:21):
how would search engine know how to prioritize the company's
business partners over just their customers. Well, it wouldn't unless
you were able to translate that human measure of importance
into a set of criteria could recognize. And this is
really where page and Brand's biggest innovation comes in. It's
this algorithm known as page rank, and yeah, it is
actually named after page himself, and using this algorithm, BackRub
(10:43):
was actually able to keep track of both the number
of links into a particular site and the number of
links into each of those linking sites. So, to go
back to the Amazon example, like, imagine that only a
few other sites linked to the teenagers blog in a friends, family, whatever.
Since most of the sites that linked to his are
likely personal as well, they probably don't have many sites
linking to them either. But on the other hand, there
(11:04):
are thousands of sites that linked to Whole Foods, and
plenty of those sites also have thousands of sites linking
to them, So page rank would recognize this distinction and
deemed the Whole food site more important than the Teenagers
site with respect to Amazon at least. All right, so
it's importance by way of popularity. Then, you know, it's
also not a perfect system, but it's definitely pretty ingenious
(11:25):
the way they came up with this, And I'm also
guessing it didn't take long for Page and Brand to
realize these page rankings could make for a pretty incredible
search engine. Yeah not at Also, they quickly found the
backrupt delivered better results than you know, any other search
engine out there, and because engines like Alta, Vista and exite.
We're only pulling in ranking sites based on giving keywords.
(11:46):
You could get linked to sites that really weren't that
authoritative or useful. They didn't have that secret weapon of
a link counting algorithm like page rank. But Page and
Britain search engine wasn't just superior at the time. Its
design meant that it would only get better and better
the bigger the Internet grew, and as more pages and
links were added to the web, the BackRub engine scaled
accordingly and was made to become more accurate. I mean,
(12:09):
it was a phenomenal design and it's actually from this
infinite scalability that we get the name Google. The founders
chose to play it as a word on Google, which
is uh the term for the number one followed by
a hundred zeros. I mean, honestly, anything is better than
the name BackRub. So good choice there. But all right,
so they have a name, they have a working engine,
(12:29):
but you know, complexity aside. This is still a school project, right, like,
it's not a business at this point. Yeah. So the
first version of Google was actually released as a feature
on the Stanford website in August of nineties, which by
the way, was only one year after Page and Brand
first met and, as we said, immediately hated each other.
And wait, now that we've covered Google and how it
got it start, let's talk a little bit about it
(12:50):
that made the transition to you know, a proper company. Sure,
but before we do, let's take a quick break. You're
listening to part Time Genius and we're talking about how
(13:10):
Google became the go to source for information on well
just about everything. Okay, So, by the fall of ninety six,
Larry Page and Serge Brand knew they had to hit
on their hands, but they weren't sure if they were
ready for all the responsibilities and headaches that come with
starting and running a business. I mean, doing so would
mean leaving Stanford early without graduating, and that was a
(13:31):
tough pill to swallow given their academic backgrounds. Or they
obviously went for it anyway. So so what caused them
to change their minds? Ultimately They're big push came from
Brian's college advisor, offering a bit of perspective. He said, uh, look,
if this Google thing pans out, then great, If not,
you can return to graduate school and finish your thesis.
And that seems sensible enough to brin. So he said, yeah, okay,
(13:52):
why not, I'll just give it a try. I love
how nonchalant this whole thing was. Like, I know they
can't know then what they know now, but just think,
get this idea of like, okay, like ditch school and
start a multibillion dollar tech company. You want to do it? Okay?
I mean there actually was a little hesitation in there.
Apparently they brought the idea to Excite and asked them
to buy it for one point six million dollars one
(14:12):
point six million, I know, And and there was actually
a discussion they had it In the story I read,
it was really more Larry Page trying to sell the idea.
But he said he'd stay with Excite for like a
few months, and then he wanted to return to school.
But the CEO of Excite said BackRub was actually too
effective and it would actually drive people off the site
too quickly, like he wanted to slow it down to
(14:33):
its speed, just to make sure that the customers stayed
on the search engine and looked at display ads. And
then like the talks broke down from there, and and weirdly,
like while there's talk of conversation for page in those discussions,
there's actually no mention of Britain, at least that's what
business insiders reporting in the memos showed. That is so strange,
all right, So they took their professor's advice. They moved
(14:54):
out of the dorm room and the Google's first office
you know, which, as we mentioned, was actually just a
garage and the suburbs of I think was Menlo Park, California.
You know. This is August of and shortly after that,
the duo received an investment I think it was a
hundred thousand dollars and this was from the co founder
of Sun Microsystems. This was actually a pretty risky move.
I mean, Google wasn't even incorporated as this legitimate company yet,
(15:17):
so they were forking over a good bit of money
for this unproven private enterprise just a couple of college dropouts.
I mean, it's definitely not a safe bet. Yeah, So
I read that their first investment check was actually made
out to Google, Inc. Which, as you said, didn't exist yet.
So Patroon Brent figured, hey, now might be a good
time to incorporate, and so they did. Wow. Of course
(15:37):
that investment paid off for everyone in the end. In fact,
we talked about the garage that they rented that was
from somebody named Susan W. Jicki And and she went
on to become the marketing manager for Google, and I
think she was their sixteenth employee. Well today she's the
CEO of YouTube. That's awesome. And I know from our
Amazon episode that all kinds of eccentric business practices and
cost saving measures crop up during the garage based days
(16:00):
of these giant companies. So like you remember the bell
Amazon employees would ring whenever they made a sale, or
those makeshift desks they called together from old doors. Did
do you come across anything like that for Google? Oh definitely,
I mean there's there's a bunch of examples. But you
know how companies use these big server racks and cabinets
to to keep you know, like they're all their computing
power and everything. Well, the rat Google started with was
(16:20):
built entirely from legos. This was actually a pretty smart move.
You know, they were pretty cash strapped and it helped
them expand along the way as long as they had
some you know, extra bricks lying around. But actually the
most famous bit of a reverence is probably the rotating
assortment of those Google doodles that show up on the
site's landing page. And believe it or not, they also
got their start in Susan's garage. I didn't realize they
(16:42):
went back that far. According to Public Radio International, they're
well over four thousand different Google doodles today, but the
very first one dates back to August thirty. N Now,
all the stress from their impending in corporation was really
starting to get to the guys, so before they even
finished all the necessary pay or work, they decided to
spend a week of the Nevada Desert at the annual
(17:03):
burning Man Festival. Serious. Yeah, it's so funny because, like
you'd think of it as a thing now where like
over Norquist is going and all these c t O
s I like have to show up. But this was
twenty years ago. I know, it's pretty wild. So so
they just had a vision for the doodle out and
the fly off. Well, no, the first toodle actually came
in the form of this out of office message that
page and brand added to the company's homepage before they
(17:25):
headed out to the desert. I guess they weren't planning
to spend a lot of time in their computer at
Burring man, but you know, appropriately enough. They decided to
use that burning man logo just a little stick figure guy,
and they placed it behind the second oh in Google,
and the guys liked the idea of decorating the company
logo as a way to mark notable events, and so
much so. In fact, two years later, the founders asked
(17:46):
one of their interns to drop up a doodle for
Best Deal Day. I love that this was the next
one that they decided. But the result was a hit,
so Page and Brand requested more and then promoted the
intern to the rank of chief Doodler. I feel like
his parents must have been so proud. Well, I mean,
I don't know how proud they were then, but they
definitely should be now. So the guy's name is Dennis Wang,
(18:06):
and I know when we visited Google, that was probably
the most excited we got. We were like, dude that
I think we even took a picture that was pretty awesome. Well,
in addition to cranking out about fifty doodles per years
since two thousand, he actually later became the company's international
webmaster too. That's pretty amazing, And I do love how
that seems to be a theme with these guys. Like
(18:28):
the woman who read them her garage became one of
their c e o s. And the guy who made
the funny drawings was put in charge of all their
international content. You know, it's pretty cool. And obviously they've
won lots of awards for employee satisfaction. You know. It
was funny when when we went out to the Google campus,
which was you know, forever ago, it just seemed like
such a dream place to work. Like they did your laundry,
(18:49):
people had their dogs with them. There were these like
free T shirt bins that everyone was so excited about,
like rationally excited about. And I remember it was sunny
and there were just people on the green with their
tops working, but then they'd seven into like a set
of volleyball that was going on. It was it was
phenomenal to see, like I'd heard all these things about Google,
but seeing it is completely different. Yeah. Well, since you're
(19:11):
bringing up Google's more benevolent aspects, I mean, why don't
we talk a little bit about the guiding philosophies that
that that kind of took shape during those early years
of the company. Because it was around this time that
Google laid out both its mission statement and that mission
statement is quote to organize the world's information and make
it universally accessible and useful. And then its official motto,
which used to be don't be evil, right and and
(19:35):
I mean the company kind of downplays that model more
and more over time, not that I think they're pro
evil now. Well, you know, for a good long while
Google seemed to take the mantra pretty seriously, and it
was actually a big part of the founders two thousand
four letter when they were announcing that Google was going public.
And those three little words. I mean that there's still
the cornerstone of the company's code of conduct if you
(19:55):
were to go look it up. So I am curious
who actually came up with mono was a page or
in uh, you know, it might not have been either
one of them, although both of them took to it
pretty quickly, and and the real origin of the phrases
is still somewhat disputed, but the best guest credits the
inspiration to Paul Bouchette, who was the engineer who created Gmail. Now,
in his mind, the motto was quote a bit of
(20:17):
a jab at a lot of other companies, especially our competitors,
who at the time, in our opinion, we're kind of
exploiting the users to some extent, which is a little
bit too be funny to hear, given what they do
with everything. But you know, Google wanted to set itself apart,
and most of the higher ups agreed the best way
of doing so was just to not be evil, which
is interesting because like, what does it really mean? I mean,
(20:40):
it seems like, just like with that question of how
to define the importance of a web page, there isn't
actually like a single clear cut definition for evil. Yeah,
it's true, but you know, if you look at some
of the reports that that have come out about this,
that there there was actually this interesting interview that Eric
Schmidt did with Wait Wait, Don't tell Me, and I
remember hearing him on the program that time, and he
was blaming the motto and he said, the idea is
(21:02):
that we don't quite know what evil is, but if
we have a rule that says don't be evil, then
the employees can say, I think that's evil. So now,
when I showed up, I thought this was the stupidest
rule ever, because there's no book about evil except maybe
you know, the Bible or something. So what happens is
I'm sitting in this meeting and we're having a debate
about an advertising product, and one of the engineers pounds
(21:22):
his fists on the table and says, that's evil, And
then the whole conversation stops. Everyone goes into connections, and
eventually we stopped the project. So it did work well.
I mean, I do love that story. And I know
we can get hung up on whether Google is always
behaving ethically, but I also kind of like that it's
just this looming guideline. Yeah, and I don't want to
get too philosophical here, but we should talk a little
(21:44):
bit more about what evil might be and and how
Google actually makes its money. But first let's take a
quick break. Okay, Well, so give it to me straight.
(22:05):
How evil is Google? Like? Are they lex core people?
Are are they more like that company from Alien that's
like constantly getting its employees killed by Alien? So those
are my two options there. I'm not so sure on
that one. Now. Recently, there's been a bit of a
love hate relationship between Google and the general public, and
I think about all the half hearted jokes you hear
(22:25):
about Google and them taking over the world, or the
way we assume and kind of accept that the company
is keeping tabs on what we do online and probably
knows everything there is to know about us. You know,
we we we did an episode I guess a couple
of months ago about how much the Internet knows about us,
and some of that was a little bit troubling, I
have to admit. And you know, the truth is that
folks are right to be somewhat wary of any company
(22:47):
that gathers data on you and then uses it to
turn a profit, right, which is something Google definitely does,
but you know, it's not alone. Movie passes model is
also based on this, and everyone's tracking our data now,
and I do think those people are at least dimly
aware that Google keeps track of where you are and
what you use its services for and and then it
uses that info to generate targeted ads. But what people
(23:09):
might not know is that this kind of advertising is
actually the most profitable part of the whole company. Yeah,
and I feel like that's kind of an open secret, though,
don't you. I mean, if you really stop to think
about it, all of Google services don't cost anything. You've
got the search engine and the web brows or the
email service, all the various apps. But you know, the
old saying goes, there's no such thing as a free lunch.
And you know, in Google's case, the unspoken cost, I
(23:32):
guess is our privacy. Yeah, but which is really weird
to think about, because like then you can kind of
make the case that we're actually the product that Google
is selling to its real customers, which you know, from
that point of view, all that handy free services that
they offer are just really incentives to get us on
board with being sold. Yeah. Well, why don't we talk
a little bit about when Google got into the ad game,
(23:53):
and I mean, I would have to think that was
a huge turning point for the company. It was, Yeah,
because for the first three years that are incorporated, Google
really wasn't making much money, you know, despite having the
best search engine in town. But that all changed in
two thousand when Google launched AdWords. So this was the
company's first venture beyond its search engine. It was an
automated paper click ad auction platform, and with Google's ability
(24:17):
to tailor the ads sold to specific users based on
their search preferences, the company was able to corner the
market and digital advertising for what's coming up on I
guess two decades now plus you know, all that income
in cash allowed Google to invest in new services like Gmail, Blogger,
Google Maps, YouTube, and in turn, each of these services
provided its own new stream of ad driven revenue. Well,
(24:39):
it's obviously really smart. And you said the AdWords platform
that works with all these services. I mean, that's where
Google's profits really come from. So how much are we
talking about? Exactly? So in two thousand seventeen, AdWords accounted
for ninety five point four billion dollars of Google's total
revenue that year, of their total revenue, which was what
about a d billion? Good lord, I mean that's the
(25:01):
difference of around fifteen billion dollars between those two. And
we say a lot of things are insane on the show,
but drawing basically a hundred billion dollars from advertising a loan, Yeah,
that's insane. That counts more insane than cats, right, yeah,
I guess, I mean I don't know. Well, so you
know what else is crazy? Is that? Uh? That Eric
Schmigay who quitted earlier, the CEO who thought don't be
(25:23):
Evil was a stupid idea. He was a big supporter
of Google going all in on ad driven revenue and
pretty much all of Google's services, the ones we mentioned
are are came about on his watch. So he stepped
down from his exact role last December and favor of
a more advisory role with the company. But after steering
the ship for the last seventeen years, his fingerprints and
business eat those are all over Google. Well, there's definitely
(25:46):
a lot to talk about on the privacy front. But
one of the other things that that many people might
find a little bit troubling, and it's something that people
have been talking about in terms of, you know, what
the Internet knows about us for years now, is that
by providing instant, unfettered act says to information about literally everything,
the Internet is actually retraining our brains to act more
like high speed data processors and less like tools for
(26:09):
careful contemplation. And I mean, i'd say that's a valid
concern for sure, but maybe it's not fair to pin
something like that entirely on Google. Like everything in moderation, right,
And if we take advantage of these services to the
point that we impair our own thinking or decrease our
attention spans, that's kind of on us, you know, sure,
But to an extent, I mean, there's also reason to
(26:31):
think that companies like Google and Facebook are are maybe
exacerbating the problem on purpose. I actually came across this
old Atlantic article from two thousand eight, and it pointed
out just how much this brain reprogramming is really in
the best interest of Google and all these other data
farming companies. The author is Nicholas car and he writes, quote,
the faster we surf across the web, the more links
(26:51):
we click and pages we view, the more opportunities Google
and other companies gained to collect information about us and
to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietor RUMs of
the commercial Internet have a financial steak in collecting the
crumbs of data we leave behind as we flip from
link to link. The more crumbs, the better. The last
thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or
(27:12):
slow concentrated thought. It's in their economic interest to drive
us to distraction, That's what he said. But so Silicon
Valley companies are going to say things like, you know,
do no evil, or have these grand mission statements about
bettering the world. It does only seem fair to hold
the company's feet to the fire a little bit when
it fails to live up to these kinds of statements.
And you know, I'd say that encouraging that kind of
(27:33):
thoughtless thinking if it makes any sense, you know, for
the sake of profit, kind of qualifies as one of
those cases. Well, I mean that that is very smart.
And on that note, I want to mention this is
a way to avoid bias. All of the research for
today's program was conducted exclusively through bing. There's no ways true.
It definitely wasn't true. That's not true. But you know
(27:54):
what true every single fact in this fact. So let's
get started, all right. We'll to put a bit of
perspective around just how much traffic is driven by Google.
Consider the fact that back in August of two thout,
(28:16):
Google had a power outage for all of about five minutes.
But during that time, everything from its search engine, to
YouTube to Google Drive, we're all down. And during that
five minute period, web traffic around the world plummeted. Bye.
So earlier we talked about the whole constructed languages crossroad
(28:36):
puzzle that we made. So do you know that you
can actually select Swedish chef as a preferred language in Google?
Did not? It's called work, work, work, and you can
also choose cling on take Latin Pirate and Elmer Fud,
among others. I'm really hoping our college friend John is
not listening today's episode since he always liked to talk
in a work work work, all right, Well, when we visited,
(28:57):
I know, we were blown away by all the perks
and the free food and everything else at Google, But
you know, reading about some of the employee benefits is
pretty interesting too. Apparently they have these unbelievable death benefits.
I know that's kind of a funny phrase to say,
but if an employee dies, their partner actually gets half
of the deceased employee salary for a decade, and the
kids of that employee get a thousand dollars a month
(29:19):
until they're nineteen, or actually until twenty three if they're
in school full time. And that's really stunning. So have
you heard about this flying taxi startup that Larry Pages
behind the company is called Kittie Hawk, and they recently
had to reveal for this thing. It's an autonomous air
taxi named Cora. Two people can actually ride in it.
It takes off with these rotors that are on the wings,
(29:40):
you know, like a helicopter, but then it just flies
like a plane. So it doesn't really need a runway.
They've been doing some secret test flights in New Zealand,
where we like to do all our testing for our
secret project. I don't want people to know that, and
in fact that they've been working with the government there
in New Zealand to get a whole fleet to these
ready to release. So how far and and and how
fast can these things go? They can apparently travel for
(30:02):
a little over sixty miles at about a hundred ten
miles per hour. They travel at about three thousand feet elevation,
and I'll definitely be interested to see what happens with these.
I might give it a little bit of time before
I happened. I think I'm gonna give it more than
a little bit of time. But it is really interesting alright. Well,
on a lighter note, I always look forward to seeing
what Google is up to on April Fool's Day. Their
pranks are always pretty funny, you know, from the Google
(30:24):
UK and Google Australia sites. Rick rolling every featured video
back in two thousand and that's a real commitments giving
us some serious ad revenue there to the Auto Awesome
for Resumes project, where you could take a boring resume,
and it would add emojis and animation, you know, to
make it more exciting. I wonder if anybody used it
and then submitted those resumes. But I think some of
my favorites are the fake food and drink products they've launched,
(30:46):
Like they had one called Google Gulp, which came in
these delicious flavors like sugar free, radical and Beta charity
and and it was quote designed to maximize your surfing
efficiency by making you more intelligent and less thirsty. Then
there was also the Google Fiber Bar, which they announced
by saying, as we started thinking about fiber, we realized
(31:06):
that there hadn't been real innovation in the world of
fiber in a very long time. It's kind of a
shame these things weren't real, I know. So I recently
read a story that the details of the acquisition of
YouTube were negotiated at a Denny's over a delicious safotazer
of Mozzarelli's at it. Yeah, so the YouTube co founder,
Stephen Chen said, quote, we didn't want to meet at offices,
(31:28):
so we were like, where's the place none of us
would go to. I'm guessing the one point six five
billion dollar deal was probably the biggest deal ever negotiated
at a Denny's. But you know what's weird. At that
time that amount of money seemed huge. I mean, I
guess it still sounds huge, but we're talking for YouTube. Yeah,
that is kind of crazy. You would think it would
have been sold for much much more. But you know,
the only thing that would have made an even better
(31:50):
fact would benefit deal had been negotiated over a plate
of moons over my family, don't you think? Definitely? But
the fact that you've successfully gotten meat or reference moons
over my hammy, Mango, I think it means I've got
to give you this fact offico congratulation. Thank you so much.
Thank you guys for listening. If we've forgotten any great
facts about Google or the Internet in general, we'd love
to hear from you. As always, you can email us
(32:12):
part time genius at how stuff works dot com or
call us on our seven fact hot line one eight
four four pt Genius Health. Can they reach us, Mango, Well,
they can reach us through email, Twitter, all all sorts
of ways. But there's one more fact I wanted to mention. Uh,
today's Gabe's birthday. Oh, happy birthday, Game, Happy birthday Gave
and if you want to send Gave a message, just
(32:33):
put on our Facebook and we'll a forward it to him. Awesome. Well,
thank you guys for listening. Thanks again for listening. Part
Time Genius is a production of how stuff works and
(32:54):
wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the
important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Christa McNeil
does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song
and does the mixy mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland does
the exact producer thing. Gave Lousier is our lead researcher,
with support from the Research Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan
Brown and Lucas Adams and Eves Jeff Cook gets the
show to your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like
(33:16):
what you heard, we hope you'll subscribe, And if you
really really like what you've heard, maybe you could leave
a good review for us. Do we do? We forget
Jason Jason who
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