In this post, I explore the critical factors in Google’s success.
1. The Founders
They both went to Montessori schools. They didn’t like each other much when they met at Stanford University and they were very argumentative with each other initially but still became co-founders. I propose it’s a valuable thing to do provided both people are intelligent. The meta-mind brought forth by conversations between seemingly opposed clever minds is capable of wonders.
2. PageRank
3. Search
4. Hardware Platform
5. Software Platform
All of Google’s servers run on GNU/Linux.
Google recruited Guido Van Rossum, the father of open-source programming language Python. Google are also looking at using Ruby.
Google has a massively parallel and scalable architecture thanks to the MapReduce algorithm.
Without understanding functional programming, you can’t invent MapReduce, the algorithm that makes Google so massively scalable.
MapReduce is, in retrospect, obvious to anyone who remembers from their 6.001-equivalent programming class that purely functional programs have no side effects and are thus trivially parallelizable.
The very fact that Google invented MapReduce, and Microsoft didn’t, says something about why Microsoft is still playing catch up trying to get basic search features to work, while Google has moved on to the next problem: building…the world’s largest massively parallel supercomputer. I don’t think Microsoft completely understands just how far behind they are on that wave. – Joel Spolsky
Google went so far as to write their own low-level device drivers to access the hard drives on their servers to optimize their architecture.
6. Contextual Advertising
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highly-targeted links are more likely to get clicked
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Where there is business there’s a need for advertising and marketing
About 99 percent of Google’s revenue comes from advertising – Slate (2005)
7. Machine Learning
Google is using this principle of artificial intelligence to enable suggestions for your misspellings.
Google is using this with a statistical method to enable better text translations by feeding human-translated texts into a software algorithm.
Google will be the first to build a General AI.
8. Feedback Loop
Google has a history of recruiting top engineers through puzzles similar to IQ tests. One example was on a billboard in Silicon Valley in 2004, reading:
{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com
Solving it brought you to a web page with more instructions, the final one being a page where you could submit your resume to Google.
This was an interesting puzzle and I explored it using a spigot algorithm for the extraction of the digits until I found that it was smarter and less time-consuming to actually Google the digits of e instead of computing them myself. One day all calculations will be done this way. All problem-solving is some kind of search.
Coming back to the subject at hand, having such recruitment puzzles have enabled Google to get excellent engineers and this gives them an edge in creativity, engineering, R&D and innovation.
Google has also since recognized the need for a more diversified approached to recruiting.
The best-of-breed work environment and perks have enabled Google to retain its strategically important workforce. In turn, being the best place to work in has made Google very attractive to non-Google people.
Recognizing the need for a strategy, management and business development specialist for the technology sector was a clever move.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin recruited Eric Schmidt from Novell, where he led that company’s strategic planning, management and technology development as chairman and CEO. Since coming to Google, Eric has focused on building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google’s rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remains high while product development cycle times are kept to a minimum. Along with Larry and Sergey, Eric shares responsibility for Google’s day-to-day operations. Eric’s Novell experience culminated a 20-year record of achievement as an Internet strategist, entrepreneur and developer of great technologies. His well-seasoned perspective perfectly complements Google’s needs as a young and rapidly growing search engine with a unique corporate culture.
Google has gone from a scalable search engine to a scalable organization.
Further reading:
A look inside the Google talent machine
Good agile, bad agile by Steve Yegge.
Is Google too powerful? – Business Week cover story
Youtube vs Boob tube – New York Magazine
Interview with Eric Schmidt by the excellent Fred Vogelstein in Wired.
As Google challenged Viacom and Microsoft, its CEO feels lucky by Fred Vogelstein again.
An older, previously unpublished interview of Eric Schmidt by Fred Vogelstein.
Google – the Ultimate Money-Making Machine by Alex Iskold at Read/Write Web.
April 2007 seems to be Google’s media month. YashLabs, BusinessWeek, New York Magazine and Wired all have reflected on Google this month.
Amazingly, some people still think of Google as just a search engine company. They forget the massive revenues from contextualized highly-targeted ads and they don’t understand that all problem-solving is some type of search. This is crucial to understanding just how much of a competitive advantage Google has over everybody else. I just finished reading one of the Wired interviews and this quote by Eric Schmidt validates my point of view which I wrote about on the 1st of April:
So one way of thinking about it is it all gets back to search. If you think about YouTube, YouTube is a “searching the world’s videos” problem, right? They all have to be there, but how do you find them? What I guess I’m trying to say is that search is still the killer app. – Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google
