The Google Episode

But before we get too far into that, let's start with a little listener mail. This listener mail comes from Alex from le Lexington, South Carolina, and Alex says, Hi, there, guys, I'm a huge fan of the podcast What a Cliche? And I was wondering if you could do a podcast on Google. I'm an avid user of Google search Engine and Gmail, but I was wondering about the company, it's history and other products like Android p s. Could you work in a way to say listener mail the way

you used to, Alex? I was going to do that, but every time I do listener mail the old way, we get a bunch of really negative reviews on iTunes and uh and and my ego just can't take it anymore. So if you really want to hear the old listener mail, I suggest listening to an old episode. I know that's lame, but I just don't. I'm tired of it. I don't. I can't take it anymore that the two factions are battling it out of or whether or not to bring

back that. Eventually one side will win definitively, and then we will have the listener male sound effect established from there on out. Alright, But in the meantime, let's move on to Alex's topic, which is Google. Yeah, we would we would probably have to do six or seven podcasts to even get close to covering the entirety of Google.

So we really wanted to focus on Google the company. Yeah, and we might talk a little bit about the search engine specifically, and then you know, well we'll mention a few other things along the way, I'm sure, but let's let's first start with the company that was founded back in nine Now that's even then, that's not going all the way back to the very beginning of Google. If you want to do that, you have to go into the time travel machine, you know, I said, we weren't

going to do sound effects. But you know what, Here we go into the time travel machine criss car all right, and we're just gonna set this back to the seatbelts broken, just hold on, okay, all right? So yea fresh out of college here I go. Um. So here we are at Stanford, Yes, and we're seeing the meeting for the first time between Larry Page and Sergey Brenn. Actually, you might expect the clouds to part and the heavenly multitude

to start singing. In reality, it's because Larry Page is visiting the campus as a prospective student and Serge has been asked to show him around. And not only that, as you might be able to hear in the background, the two don't really get along so well. Actually, we weren't there at the first time that this happened. We're only witnessing it now as a result of having our own time machine. But Google is actually remarkably forthcoming about

about some of this early information. Yeah, apparently the two had some disagreements on pretty much absolutely everything they talked about. However, let's let's jump back over here. Let's quick just do a jump ahead by a year, all right, so so now it's a year later and Larry and Serge are both at Stanford as as grad students, and now they're working on a project together. And Chris alluded to this

earlier in the episode. Yes, um, although it uh, it's kind of funny to imagine an actual company, especially one in the size of Google, being called this. The original version of the search engine was actually called back Rub and it was located on the Stanford servers, which was fine for a while until people actually started using it and the traffic became too much for Stanford, which said get out. Yeah, no, grant, this is back in nineties six.

Bandwidth back then was different from them what it is today. But yes, it was using up too much of the bandwidth. So Sarah, Gay and h and Larry, I just call him that we're buds. You've been to one Google io event, and here I am calling the founders by the first name. Uh. They have no idea who I am. They're kind of informal guys. Yeah, I hear that they're very nice. I've never met either of them, but at any rate, they

decided that they're onto something here. And so the next year, in fact, hey, let's let's go back to to modern day and just talk about this in the past. It's come too much jumping otherwise, I'm okay with all right, let's let's we're gonna just pop right onto m much better. Okay. So a year after they first started the BackRub project, they decided that they wanted to try and make this

an actual business. And that's when they said, okay, well, you know what, we probably need a different name, and they started to kind of pitch around different ideas for names. They eventually came up with a play on a word called that's Google, but Google spelled g o O g O L. And what is a Google? It is a one followed by a hundred zeros. That is a very

large number. It's it's ginormous, as they say, and it actually alludes to their goal of trying to um organize and identify all the information on the Internet, which was a whole lot of it. Yeah, that this this brings us to the company's mission, and the mission has not changed since at first was founded, and the mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Now you may have also heard that Google

has an informal motto, which is don't be evil. Yes motto, especially when you're talking about a company that is getting as large and pervasive as Google, you're gonna hope that they're not going to be evil. Um if they are evil, they become Skynet. So uh so Google the whole idea behind don't be evil falls into into two different realms. Really. One is that they want to provide people with accessible

information and accurate information that is completely objective. So, in other words, they want to give people search results based upon what people want to find. They don't want to, you know, give preferential treatment to one company over another because of some sort of relationship they have with that company. They want to be as objective as possible. That's that's rule number one one. The second part of it is

they must operate within the law. So if whatever they want to do would be against the law, that goes against their motto, their informal motto of don't be evil. Uh. This is actually actually became a very interesting subject recently when Google began to talk about the possibility of getting out of China. Now, Google got into China back in two thousand and six, and even when they were first

going into China. UH executives were saying that it was going to be an uneasy situation because in China, it's impossible for Google to follow both of those rules UH to the letter to to not be evil, because in China, the Chinese government is very specific about companies have to be able to censor search results information that's coming into the country. The government has a very strict view on what can and cannot be allowed in right, and a

lot of governments do this. China is not alone in this, but China in particular has a pretty big net. Yes. I mean, they're known for having the Great Firewall of China, which blocks lots and lots of information from getting into the country. So in China, it's it was essentially impossible to both follow the law and give people free access

to objective information. So for for nearly four years, Google kind of struggled with this, and now it looks like they may actually get out of that country due to some other events which I guess we don't have to really go into that. Actually, they actually didn't enter China until fairly late because you know, as we were talking about it just a moment ago, you know, they were really launching as a large commercial entity or on the entity that would become the large commercial entity in UM.

But you know, they didn't actually get into China until January of two thous and six, so that was actually sort of a late They were late to the market, and they didn't make up a very large percentage of the search market in China, unlike the rest of the world. Now globally, Google makes up around sixty percent of the

search traffic, but in China it was much lower. UM So some people have taken that opportunity to say that China that Google really got out of China because it wasn't a particularly profitable business and it was a lot of bad PR so it made a good PR move to get out of China. I'm not quite that cynical. I don't necessarily think that that was what was going through their the executive's minds when they finally said, you know what, it's time for us to make a stand

on this. But I don't know for sure. I could be I could be putting on the rose colored glasses in this case. But let's uh, I guess we should dial back the time just a little bit, kind of go through some of the other stuff that happened. Like you mentioned, they became a company in So this is where all you people who who like to either play a trivia or or run trivia games need to start writing this stuff down, because we're gonna give you lots

and lots of little trivia bits yep yep. Now. Um, actually, Google was sort of a darling of the industry very early on because in December, that's when PC magazine basically said, hey, these guys are really onto something big and um they actually named it as one of the top hundred websites of um. And for a company that new on the scene to take on somebody as large as Yahoo, I mean,

Yahoo was the portal. They were the destination for people who wanted to find stuff on the Internet at that point, and um, you know, for somebody to come in out of the blue and uh and take over and have them say, you know, hey, these guys have search down pat If you want to find something, use Google. And that's really remarkable, especially considering the fact that, I mean even before Google became an actual entity, they got a

hundred thousand dollars in funding. So you're about an upstart company that, by the way, was housed in a garage. I mean that we've seen this before. There are other big companies that got their starting garages. I can think of two off the top of my head, Microsoft and Apple. There you go another one. So you look at these major companies, they started off in people's garages. Google is

no different. In fact this this would be surprising to me, just because by I would have thought you've gotten past the point where anyone could create an upstart company that could become a world power. But Google did it. Um, or rather Larry and Sage managed to do it, and

uh so they incorporate. Um, it's not until two thousand four that they go public, and once they go public, they start, Uh there's I think they're training around eighty five dollars of shares and the I p O went live then and uh um, if you should actually look it up if you're curious to see exactly how much money they intended to raise with their I p O, because it's a very funny number. If my memory serves me correctly, I didn't think about until just now, so

I didn't look at back up. But if I'm not mistaken, they were looking to raise e you know, the mathematical constant e. That's how much money they were attempting to raise. I just looked at the I just looked up the the number number that went uh, the actual number of shares, and the amount per share that went h live on August eighteenth, and that was eighty five dollars per share. So I was right. I can't believe I actually remembered correctly.

And they and they opened with nineteen million, six hundred five thousand, fifty two shares of Class A common stock. That's quite a few. That's a lot. Yeah, and it's gone up since then. Yeah. Actually this morning, the morning that we are recording this podcast, it will be totally different by the time you guys hear it. Just bear that in mind. But this morning, when I looked it up, it was trading at five fifty nine dollars and twenty cents per share. Yeah, that's a pretty big jump from

eighty five bucks. Yes, and I'm not sure if there have been any splits one way or the other since then. So the company employees twenty nearly twenty thousand employees um and the revenue for the lab for the third quarter of two thousand nine nearly six billion, dollars in revenue just for three months. That's not a year. That's three months, six billion dollars. Now, the profit profit is what you get when you take your revenue, you take your costs,

you subtract the costs from the revenue. Profit was only tiny, little three points seven billion, So you know, come on Google, seriously, I'd settle for one billion of that, you know I would. I would also settle for a billion. Um. Well, there's there's so much to Google. So um, let's let's touch on the search because that's the bread and butter of how Google got started. Sounds good. Um, Google does use

spiders and crawlers to look for information on the interner it. Um, they're very polite in the don't be evil sense, and that you can. You can actually have a spiders file in your website and Google will if you tell them to stay away from it. I don't know why you would do that. Well, if you've got a site that's on the web, presumably you'd have it there so people can find it. But you could do it, Yes, you could.

And there are companies that are talking about doing that. Uh. In this case, we're talking about think companies that are wanting to protect their their content from being displayed freely on Google before you they before they're given a chance of charging you to get a glimpse at it. Yes, yes, a number of publishers are actually considering blocking themselves, um from Google's uh digital eyeballs so that they can be the first to tell you what it is that they

have to say for a fee. And Google's response has essentially been good luck with that. But um, it's not really the search itself and cataloging the information that makes the difference for Google. It's actually the algorithm it uses to display results on the search engine results. Page rank situation is serups, UM, serups and s EO are going to be big things that we talk about here. So page rank is an interesting system, and it's a secret system.

It's a The algorithm that Google uses is secret and they tweak it all the time. And there are a lot of different reasons to tweak it. One is just that Google wants to make sure that the company is providing the best search results possible whenever you're searching for any particular topic. Another is uh, the reason they tweak it is is to avoid people gaming the system, like they don't want people to say, oh, Google looks for this, this, and this, So as long as we build that into

our site, we're gonna rank really well in Google. Now, why would you want to rank well in Google? Well, you want to show up on the first page of the search results. Because people don't generally click very deeply into search results. You don't want to a lot of people don't go to the eteenth and fifteenth and sixteenth pages. Most people don't go to the page to Most people look at the first the first few links that are on the first page, which is what you get if

you click the I'm feeling lucky button. You go directly to the very first link that Google has, and I think the first non advertisement, because you can you can become an advertiser with Google and they will put your results as a sponsored result. This listed separately. It's under a different color, so you can clearly see that one of them is an advertisement, whereas one is just a link that's pulled up through page rank. But yeah, the first page rank result is the one that you can't

when you click on I'm feeling lucky. So how do you rank well in Google? Well, the easy answer is that you create a really really good website. Yes, uh, and that sounds like a pat answer, But in general, that's exactly what Google is looking for. I mean, the the the things that Google looks at our incoming links to your site, are other sites linking to your site, because if they are, that's usually a sign of quality. Yeah. Um, back,

sorry to interrupt. And in the early days of s c O or search engine optimization, UM, a lot of people would try to overload their the code and their websites with keywords, and sometimes they would put them. I remember trying to bookmark pages that had dozens and dozens of keywords in the actual page title because they were

trying to load up. But um, Google doesn't necessarily pay attention to the number of keywords that you have in there, but it does look at where they are on the page, and who's linking to you and to whom you're linking, and how old the site is, all sorts of little bits and details that sort of tell you whether or not this page really is what it is, or if you're just trying to fool it by throwing in a whole bunch of keywords. And they look at the quality

of the links that are coming in as well. So let's say that you have a website and you have a bunch of link farms. Link farms are these sites. You've probably seen them. It's a site where it's just a bunch of links to other sites. And the concept here is you're trying to game the system. You're trying to create all these different sites that are really just a bunch of links so that they count towards the link count and page ranks. Says oh, well, there are

all these websites that are linking to this page. This page must be a good one, so I will rank it higher. That's really irritating. Google actually gets around that a little bit. So what they're looking for is they're looking for the quality of the websites that are linking

to you. If you have a website that has a hundred incoming links pointing at your website, but they're all from these really tiny websites or even link farms, it's not going to do as well in page rank as a website that has five incoming links from really well established websites. So let's say that your website has links coming into it from um don't Well, we'll see how stuff works how Stuff Works is actually regarded as a very good website through Google UM as our websites like CNN, MSNBC, UM,

like anything that's that's been around for a while. There's it's got a UH, an easily identifiable UH brand behind it. That usually counts for a lot. UM. The sites are established, they went on the net, people are linking to them, and so those those sites that do well in Google already UM are considered trusted sites too. So that links to you. Then that that's going to count more than Joe Bob who has his you know, Joe Bobb's world

of the web. Until Joe Bob you know, is around and gets big and people know who he is and stuff right, and then Joe Bob's kicking butt exactly yeah, and it can happen. And again, a lot of the UH a lot of the people out there who are saying that they can help you your website rank betteran Google UH we call the Search engine optimization or se oh UM. There are little tricks you can do that can help a little bit, but the best thing you can do is provide the most compelling, interesting and user

friendly web experience you can UH. Make sure that your data is relevant, make sure that that's presented in an attractive way. That uh not. It shouldn't just be attractive, it should also be user friendly in the sense that you want it to be able. You want people using

different browsers to be able to see it. So if you create this really amazing website that has all these bells and whistles and special effects, but only the people who are running the very latest web browsers can see it, that's not gonna do so well for you when you're coming to Google page rank, because it's a lot of people just aren't even gonna link to you because they

can't even see the stuff that's on your site. Yeah, and um, you know, if you do search engine optimization correctly anyway, you're you're sort of helping Google out because you can you can give them a brief a brief set of keywords and things that will help Google identify what the page is actually about. Um, if you try to overload it, it's it's going to register as noise to Google and will not help you. As a matter of fact, it could actually put you farther down the list.

But we should talk about the hardware to because I mean in order to do this, to operate this search engine, UM, you know, there have to be lots and lots and lots of computers involved. Yeah, and they're actually using very average machines when you when you look at it from UH server technology and Google's philosophy is that it's a lot cheaper to replace a broken average machine than it would be to replace a broken state of the art machine.

And if five average machines are the same cost collectively as one state of the art machine, and you're still getting an equivalent or even better amount of performance from those five machines collectively, then it makes more sense to go with that. So the data centers at Google are filled with these these UH fairly average servers UM. Now a lot of them are configured in a very special way that Google has has kind of come up with,

and you can actually read all about this. There are UM articles on the web that that talk about the kind of configuration that Google uses UH. And they have a very special file management system that allows the search engine to reference information very very quickly, which is why

you don't have a big delay when you do a search. UM. And they have lots of them, thousands and thousands of these computers, and they also make lots and lots of redundant backups, so if any of these machines fails, it's not going to really cost more than just a tiny blip. And so we should just say win these machines because they're all kinds of machines. That's exactly why Google has built redundancy into its system, because they know these machines

are fallible. They will fall apart or stop working, or you know, there'll be some glitch that after a while well going unchecked, will shut down a server or perhaps even a full rack of servers. So yeah, there has to be redundancy. That's why Google has also looked at some really interesting potential solutions for for data centers. Because data there's take a lot of space, they take a lot of power, they generate tons of heat. So there have been a few interesting patents out there for potential

solutions to this, including a giant floating data center. That's one of my favorites. Um. I'm not sure that we're ever going to see it, but it's a really cool idea. So um and they also take good care of their employees. They have very good benefits for their employees. They have their main headquarters in California. House you California, all kinds of nice amenities. It's called the Google Plex, and it's designed in a campus layout, so there are several buildings

on the campus. You'll often see people on segways or bicycles going to and from the different buildings. UH. Most of their please work in an open environment. There are very few private offices on the Google Plex. Um. They all get a day to work on personal projects. Yeah, essentially of your time can be spent working on personal projects, and a lot of those have actually turned into other

stuff that they've offered, like or cut. Yeah. If you go to Wave Google Labs, which is one of their that's where they have like some of the newest stuff that they're working on, and most of it is kind of in an experimental phase where it's not necessarily ready for UH to be rolled out as a as a full fledged feature. A lot of that comes from that time. Yep, yep. They've got game rooms, exercise rooms, they have an an

infinity swimming pool lane thing. Um. They it's it's also amazing they've they've grown so much too over the past several years. Just the different services they've offered to acquisitions, uh, you know up and comers, people like Rightly and YouTube and Pyra Labs, which is the the company that created Blogger, all kinds of news services. Now they're getting into a video advertising and that's how they make their their money

is through advertising. That's that that is if you're wondering how Google makes all that money, that revenue we talked about earlier, it's through ads. Google ads are huge, um, and they're really popular and they dominate the ad space

in the search market. Yeah. That's Um, it's funny because you know, even Joe Bob when he gets his website going, you know, he's going to be able to sign up for an ad Sense account with Google and offer Google powered ads on his website and they will you send him a check every time it gets to a certain point and then pass that when he becomes a big star um for his amazing blog. I encourage you to check it out. Um. But you know this is basically

it's Google sort of sharing the wealth. The more advertising you can send to them, they will cut you in on the deal. You know, so you know, once you're

a registered member of the ad Sense. But um, it's it's because of Google's It all comes down to Google's results though, because um, because Google is such a useful tool, people want to advertise next to it because they know they're getting good results, and people are going to see those ads alongside those results and at that that coveted place at the top of the page for which they

actually do an auction. And we could talk about tons of other Google products, but we're running out of time, But just to give you a kind of a quick rundown, you have things like the Chrome web browser, as well as the upcoming Chrome operating system, operating systems, Android operating system for mobile phones. Yep. You've got Google Voice, which is as kind of an interesting experiment. Sometimes it works

for me and sometimes it doesn't. Um. You've got Gmail, which was private until Valentine's Day of I think two thousand seven, and then they opened it up to everybody. Um. You've got a Google Wave, which is still in the experimental phase. We were talking about that kind of thing earlier. Google Reader, Google Readers, UM, Google Books, where they're trying to digitize all the books in the in the world. So Google's serious about this organizizing all the world's information

there's there's the Google Health for medical records. It goes on and on, and eventually Google is gonna know everything about us. And if you're ever confused about who you are or what your role is in the world, you probably could just Google yourself. That'll just remind you. But we could do a series of podcasts on all the different pieces of Google, and we have. We've done one Android and we've talked a bit about Google Docs before. So but yes, uh, it's a fascinating company. Um, and

it I see it continuing. It's it's a question. Well, some of us say, look, organizing the world's information and others say world domination. The two very well made, go hand in hand together. Uh. So I hope you enjoyed that. Um, Alex, I hope that answered your question. If you have any other specific questions about Google, please write us all right addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. You can write It's just like this other instance of listener mail.

So this one comes from Rain who is twelve years old and is from British Columbia, Canada, and says, I know that this isn't stuff you should know, but I think a couple of high coups should explain my suggestion. Here's my suggestion. It's such a great suggestion. Okay, here it goes. Actually, this just doesn't feel right for tech stuff. Well, I was wondering how Project natal X plus three sixty and the arc, but it is the art part of a new system, maybe PS four and the WEE is

starting to drop in sales. Do you think they're going to make a new we I think this would be a great topic for a podcast. Well, we'll probably do a podcast about the future of video game consoles, But right now, I think we're stuck with what we've got for the next year. Yeah. I think it's probably gonna be a few years before any of these guys replace what they have out there with anything new, partially because the costs of research and development, um, and partially because

people are still, you know, buying the old ones. Yep, I think, uh, I think pretty much we're gonna be stuck with that for the next couple of years, like you said, and uh, yeah, these these new devices look like they're going to be working with the the current generation game systems, and I think, um, I've heard rumors that there's going to be a high definition WE, But I don't think it's going to be a new machine

other than the graphics output. Of course, the existing just won't necessarily work in you know, ten eight, you won't necessarily upscale. But but I don't think it's going to, you know, use a whole lot of new technology. I think it's going to be an incremental step to the WE one point five rather than the WE two point Now, if you write, well, thanks a lot, Rain and uh, thanks all of all to all of you for listening to our show. Remember we do a live show that's

on Tuesday's at one pm Eastern. You can find a link to that through our blogs. Just go to house stuff works dot com and look along the right hand side. You'll find links over there and Chris and I will talk to you again, possibly about Google really soon. For moralness and thousands of other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the how Stuff Works homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you