![Picture](/uploads/5/7/0/3/5703375/349103440.jpg?381)
![Picture](/uploads/5/7/0/3/5703375/209610825.jpg?351)
![Picture](/uploads/5/7/0/3/5703375/129767846.jpg?380)
Up Next: Favorite In The Plex excerpts
Last month I kicked off my Independent Study with Professor Paul Jones in the School of Information and Library Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. Over the course of the month I have been focusing primarily on Google- for a couple of reasons. The first is that I am extremely interested in learning more about the algorithms that guide Google’s structure and organization of information. Their mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, and over the past month I have learned a great deal about how they plan on doing so. In one of my Information Systems classes, INLS 200: Retrieving and Analyzing Information, we have been comparing search engines and analyzing why many of us default to Google opposed to other search engines. The second reason I have been focusing on Google is because in November I applied for a product marketing summer internship position with them. I was delighted to make it to the final round of interviews and ultimately receive an internship offer, but these opportunities only made me more curious about the company. During the interview process I began reading In The Plex by Steven Levy. The book offered immense insight into the inner workings of Google and provided a particularly good foundation about the company’s beginnings. ![]() Left: Google's headquarters, dubbed "The Googleplex," is located in Mountain View, California. I will spend eleven weeks there this summer working on a product marketing for a specific Google product. I will dedicate this post to a few things that struck me about the way that Google was founded and how they plan to evolve as a company. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work with them, and by the end of the semester I hope to be able to compare what I learn about Google to what I learn about other companies and their founders. Professor Jones has recommended a few business-oriented books that will augment my knowledge on the ways that these tech companies have chosen to structure their growth. But before I get ahead of myself, let’s talk about In The Plex… The first chapter of the book is titled “The World According to Google: Biography of a Search engine.” Within the initial seventy pages I had already learned an immense amount about the company. I read these chapters much slower than I normally would, taking time to annotate the pages and conduct additional research. Steven Levy begins the book with a background on Google’s opportunity, giving perspective on what the budding Internet industry was like when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were developing Google. “In retrospect, the web was to the digital world what the Louisiana Purchase was to the young United States: the opportunity of a century,” explains Levy (16). As the Internet gained traction, university students were given the unique opportunity to interact with cutting edge technologies and to help the industry evolve. If I were ever going to be a computer science student I would have wanted to be one in the mid-nineties, a time in which there was ample bustle and unlimited potential. This is the time period in which Larry Page and Sergey Brin were PhD students at Stanford, working in a building named after Bill Gates to build a company that would one-day rival Gate’s own company, Microsoft (14). ![]() Left: The Gates Building at Stanford, where Larry Page and Sergey Brin initially began their Google project. One of the first things that stuck out to me when reading about Larry Page was the way that his thesis advisor described his way of thinking. “It was science fiction more than computer science,” said Terry Winograd, “but an outlandish mind was a valuable asset, and there was definitely a place in the current science to channel wild creativity.” This one quote encompasses one of the core traits that draws me to Google- it is place of great technical strength and intellectual rigor, but there is still ample room for creativity. In a sense I think that this is what sets Google apart from other search engines, what draws us away from competitors and has created its own cult of followers. Google was built in a way that valued diversity of thought and appreciation of unconventional thinking. “Looking at things from different perspectives could lead to unexpected solutions,” explained Page (39). When Page and Brin began developing Google, they strayed from their academic work as they devoted more and more time to the budding search engine. Levy hit the nail on the head by explaining that Larry and Sergey were product-oriented, not paper-oriented, people (32). They set high goals from the beginning, something that I admire about the duo. Although many of these goals seemed initially impossible, they chose to redefine impossible rather than settling for what seemed attainable at the time. Arthur Clarke once described the best technology as “indistinguishable from magic,” providing a framework for what Brin and Page hoped to achieve. “We want Google to be as smart as you- you should be getting an answer the minute you think of it,” said Brin when explaining Google’s future goals (35). They aimed to achieve such goals by placing an emphasis on artificial intelligence. This was done in many ways, particularly when hiring new employees. Marissa Mayer, one of my favorite Googlers, was the 20th employee at Google and has a strong background in artificial intelligence. As the first woman engineer, Mayer continues to be a face of the company and now serves as Vice President of Location and Local Services. I am dying to meet Marissa during my internship this summer because I share her interest in location-based services and would love to hear her advice on being a woman in a male-dominated field. Alongside Mayer, Peter Norvig was influential in shaping the way that Google would leverage artificial intelligence. He believed that instead of creating an artificial intelligence department within Google that Sergey and Brin should spread AI everywhere in the company- a decision that has probably helped facilitate innovation across all departments (62). ![]() Left: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. Google was wildly successful for innumerable reasons, but my research has focused on Larry and Sergey’s appreciation and implementation of creative business practices and their creation and regulation of a unique corporate culture, despite rapid growth in company size and profitability. I am going to attempt to keep the remainder of my blog posts short, focusing on one element of the company or one employee that I admire. As I said earlier, reading In The Plex prompted a heavy load of additional research and I have tried my best to match these findings with what I learned from Steven Levy’s work to create posts that stem from multiple sources.
Up Next: Favorite In The Plex excerpts
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Started restructuring this site on 12/24/2011 by adding this page. It will mainly consist of technology ramble and things that you probably won't read.
Archives
April 2012
Categories
All
|