What's It Like to be Google's Boss Techie?

We'd like to welcome Google Director of Technology Craig Silverstein as our next Slashdot interview victim... err... guest. You think you run a big Linux server farm? Craig's is bigger. Think your Web site gets a lot of traffic and creates a lot of headaches? Just think what Craig must face! Post whatever you'd like to ask Craig below, one question per post. About 24 hours after this runs we'll email Craig 10 of the highest-moderated questions, and we'll post his answers shortly after he gets them back to us.

Google's inescapable coolness.

[rob_from_ca]

How do you avoid business pressures to make short-sighted solutions, and consistently make good, common sense ideas work instead of adopting ones from marketing sources? Not only does Google have the best search engine technology, but you consistently do the "right" thing. Clean, quick homepage, text only well-identified ads, interesting research projects, etc...This is the way many search engines start, but they all went the way of the "dark" side instead of adopting the "right" solution. In my jobs, it's been very difficult to execute and justify good engineering (or just common sense) under pressure from the people who control the money. Any advice for driving through well-thought-out decisions instead of adopting the "management fad of the month"?

Browser stats lacking at Zeitgeist

[crow]

They have a nice graph, but no scale. I suppose you could do some careful pixel analysis of the graph to generate percentages, but it's a shame they don't list them.

Interestingly, I see "Other" has been steadily rising since it bottomed out in January, and has now surpassed Netscape 4. I would love to be able to click on that chart and see a detailed list of the percentages, and what "other" is composed of. Hopefully we'll see Mozilla get its own line on the graph soon.

It would also be nice to see a breakdown on a per-OS basis. I wonder how many people are running Internet Explorer on Linux? (Seriously, that would indicate what portion of non-IE users hack the browser tag to make web sites happy.)

Re:Why did you chose Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

you're dumb.

10,000 Solaris, HPUX or 2k licenses? No-friggin-thank-you-very-much.

Testing and Deployment

[mo]

How can you possibly test bugfixes/changes that need to get deployed to thousands of machines? Furthermore, how in the heck do you deploy the changes once they're tested. I understand you probably can't describe the exact process, but perhaps you can enlighten us on some principals learned on the subject of CM on such a massive scale.

Googlebombing

[HMV]

In fact, there is an opposite concern. Whether through a network of links or through coordinated googlebombing [googlebombing.com] [googlebombing.com], weblogs frequently show up near the top due to the nature of reciprocal linking between the blogs. Not saying that's good or bad (sometimes a sole voice is a better expert on a topic than CNN), but it is what it is. Ranking "links" seems valid enough, but then you ask if that includes machine-generated links by someone's aggregator and the issue becomes a little more cloudy.

Google toolbar for open source browsers?

[apol]

I've become addicted to the Google toolbar [google.com]. It only works with IE which I use at work since I am forced to use windows there. Now with Mozilla 1.0 and my constant wish to minimise the usage of Microsoft products, I am faced with the dilemma of keeping IE or loosing the Google toolbar.

Why haven't you implemented yet the toolbar for open source browsers? Are there technical difficulties or rather lack of interest from Google?

Re:Favoring Big Guys

[killmenow]

Furthermore, estimates are that search engines miss a large portion of Internet content available. There must be literally millions of web pages that don't even show up in your cache because they are too small, or because nobody links to them. But there may be a site out there that has all the information you could ever want to know about some esoteric topic that only the person who created the site and the few friends that person may have...but since nobody else links to it, nobody else knows about it.

So how do you find those treasure troves? And how do you decide which ones are treasure troves and which ones are the millions of "all about me" web pages? Or do you care?

Re:Possible to have too much power

[NCamero]

FYI: That Heinlein novel was named Friday.

Re:King of the search engines

[Kickstart70]

For a long while Lycos claimed to have knowledge of the most pages as well. There are many different ways of saying who is 'king'. I don't disagree that Google beats the heck out of everything else currently available though.

Now...if Google wants to stay on top with me, I'd like to see the following:

• 'regexp.google.com', so that we have a little more control over how and what we search
• If not regexp, then at least wilcards for words. I would like to search for something like "word1 * word3" and have the search engine return all the instances where word1 and word3 have any number of word2' between them.
• Dropping country specific google sites. I absolutely hate the fact that when I type in 'www.google.com' it autoforwards me to 'www.google.ca' with Canadian content enabled. I've spoke to them about it, and there are workarounds, but they refuse to make it easy to not be categorized by country.
• I'd like to see the last time a returned link was indexed by Google, to know how up-to-date a link is. This especially becomes vital for technical issues, where a returned link on a specific piece of software is no longer useful because of version changes.

I can come up with a lot of things saying 'how to make search engines more useful'. Now if only someone would listen.

Kickstart