The Man Who (Really) Makes Google Tick 250
An anonymous reader writes "Like his friends Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Craig Silverstein abandoned his PhD studies at Stanford to become employee No.1 and technology director at Google. While building the search engine in a garage, never in his wildest dreams did he think Google would become what it is today. Not only is it the envy of software giant Microsoft, Google continues to redefine the technology market with its creativity and tenacity. In this in-depth interview, Silverstein discusses a wide range of issues including the backlash against Gmail among privacy advocates, the company's cultural changes and its shifting reliance on PageRank."
Re:The problem I see with Gmail privacy (Score:5, Informative)
Google Spam (Score:5, Informative)
Was looking for setup details on a Siemens router today, so I googled the brand and model #. The first few pages were results from overpriced worthless drop-ship web "retailers" instead of useful information. Isn't that stuff supposed to be over on Froogle instead?
Re:The problem I see with Gmail privacy (Score:3, Informative)
No... (Score:5, Informative)
The last brouhaha people had was when Google de-listed xenu.net [xenu.net] completeley over a complaint from Scientology [slashdot.org].
It was March 2002. Buying out Deja was 2/12/2001. Scientology lead with 2 stories on
Re:Boycott Google! (Score:0, Informative)
Most of the countries have outlawed guns, simply because they are harmful.
US is the only crazy country sticking onto ancient and stupid means of fighting all in the name of freedom. Do you really think that if there is going to be war tomorrow, it is going to be fought with guns?
Most of Europe is far more developed (and civilized) and have bans on guns. Ditto for even several third world nations (India, for instance).
There is no point in supporting guns. We are not barbarians. Atleast not unless you're a gun-nut.
Re:Name (Score:0, Informative)
Re:US: Protection by the fifth amendment (Score:5, Informative)
At least in the US, a good lawyer can make a case that the PGP will self-incriminate based on the fifth amendment.
That doesn't mean jack-sqaut in a civil suit which is what I was mostly worrying about in my parent post. They can subpenoa just about anything and everything.
You have less rights in a civil case and the burden of proof is much lower.
Re:GMail and Attachments (Score:5, Informative)
The reason? they don't want you to use it as your personal hard drive on the web. If you want a hard drive, use one of the hard drive websites. This is perfectly understandable since they must have done their calculations on how much space a person would really use, and that would be based on emails and regular attachments, not file backups.
Re:From the Article: (Score:3, Informative)
The ammount of fluf talked on to a simple english sentence is amazing, yet a computer would need to be able to find what the sentence was about, disregard unimportant stuff, take into account the extra details, then translate that into a highly tuned search for the information... 300 years might not be too far off the mark.
Re:Name (Score:4, Informative)
-Colin [colingregorypalmer.net]
Re:STOP THE MADNESS (Score:1, Informative)
Re:The problem I see with Gmail privacy (Score:1, Informative)
A passphrasse and the fifth amendment?
Re:No... (Score:1, Informative)
There's lots of ongoing issues - one of the most recent being searches for the word 'Jew' bringing up a hate site as the first link [google.com]. They've got an explanation and an apology at the top - it makes interesting reading.
There was an attempt to Google-bomb the word 'Jew [wikipedia.org]' to bring up an article on Wikipedia as the first link - it had worked, but I notice it's at number two again. Hence my link.
I wouldn't be surprised if there are dozens more disputes and problems, most of which we probably never hear about. Google is by no means perfect, but they do seem remarkably level-headed and decent when it comes to the responses to such issues.
Re:Really, nothing is stopping them (Score:3, Informative)
Email messages are stored in many different formats, usually separately for each user or group of users, on several servers. On Unix systems, mail is often just kept in one file per user before delivery. On Company servers using Exchange or Lotus, it will be in several database like files, on Yahoo or MSN, I don't know but I doubt very much there's a single huge database you can SELECT from.
For any one given mail spool, it's trivial to search the messages for a keyword, but that's not the practical problem. The practical problem for somebody wanting to search every user's email together is to perform all the trivial searches over all the servers over all the operating systems over all the storage formats used by all the organizations being investigated. With Gmail, all this is moot if, as everyone claims, they have one single huge distributed storage system for everyone's mail.
Perhaps you would better understand the following analogy: currently, searching everyone's email is like you surfing the net with a web browser. You hop from one machine to the next, from one page to the next, doing a bit of searching and a bit of looking for where to search next. With Gmail, everyone's mail is indexed in one easy to use place, so searching mail becomes like web browsing via a search engine. It's just so much easier there's no comparison.Re:They forgot to ask him... (Score:1, Informative)
not answering questions? (Score:2, Informative)
define:answer [google.com]
>> questions
Something like, say, 200 miles in metres? [google.com]