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."
The problem I see with Gmail privacy (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How long can Google maintain? (Score:5, Interesting)
Lots of companies succeed against MS. Not that it's the easiest thing to do in the world, but it's doable. Google might be another Intuit.
Re:The problem I see with Gmail privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
Is not having all your personal information in the hands of Google. I don't feel that Google is the threat here. They've proved time after time to be an honest company. I'm more worried about some crazy new law (Patriot Act anyone?) giving the Government / Other corporations instant access to this online archive of some of our most private information.
You've just summed up in one short paragraph why I refuse to use webmail as anything other then a spam bucket to register on websites. Sorry, but I'd agree with the tin-foil hat people on this occasion -- I just don't like the idea of my e-mail floating out there on a Hard Drive that I don't control.
It's not even all about the Government. What happens if you get divorced or sued and they subpoena Google for your e-mail? At least (God Forbid) if you have control over it you can dispose of it. Hell I'd worry more about this scenario then the Government -- at least the Government needs probable cause and has to prove their case against you. Quite frankly lawyers scare the hell out of me if they aren't working for me -- and even then they still scare me some.
The only advantage to webmail is having an e-mail address that never changes. If your like me and bounce around ISPs a lot then register your own domain and get an el-cheapo webhoster that provides you with e-mail. I've been doing this for the last six years and it works out quite nicely -- I never have to change my e-mail address. More importantly I can create spam buckets at will and have control over my address and the software behind it.
Not that any of this is going to stop me from getting a gmail account with my favorite username once it goes live. Be nice to have a big name webmail account that doesn't have a bunch of numbers in it :)
Re:News +1hr: Boycott! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The problem I see with Gmail privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing is currently stopping the government from snooping on your email from other mail providers (e.g. yahoo, msn, aol)
It's not all about the Government. If you have an archive of e-mail stored on a machine that you don't control it can be subpoenaed by lawyers in any type of suit against you. Of course they can also subpoena it if you do control it but random Hard Drive failures and accidental deletions have been known to happen... The point being that if it resides on hardware you own you have options -- with Gmail or Yahoo you have none other then to bend over and hope you deleted anything that could harm you.
Encryption really doesn't play into this as far as I'm concerned. I'm far more worried about the divorse lawyer or the ex-employee with an axe to grind then I am about the Government. Encryption is useless if you don't have a good records-retention policy backing it up. Besides, what's to stop them from subpoenaing your private PGP key?
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
one point this interview skips entirely.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Secrecy (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing's for certain: The guy does an excellent job of keeping up Google's mysterious aura. When asked if the number of servers was 10k or more like 100k, he said "over 10k". When asked about future technologies and directions for the company, he always answered vaguely ("I can't comment on specifics").
This is pretty cool. The aura that google has that no one knows how it works, and no one knows where it is, and no one knows what it's doing... That's a pretty cool public image to have for something used as much as google is. I just wonder if investors are going to want to know more about what's going on.
~Will
In-depth Interview? (Score:1, Interesting)
It's got more than a few questions, but few of them are terribly interesting, and (by necessity, I'm sure) many of the answers are vague or "I can't really talk about that".
Re:The problem I see with Gmail privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How long can Google maintain? (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft's victories come in the software front (Netscape, Quicken, Office, etc.) where they can leverage their operating system dominance.
Google's home turf is massively scalable, reliable web services. Even though much of it is secret, all signs point to an incredible advanced platform that keeps these things running. Its highly redundant and distributed, using some cutting edge research and open source technologies. If Microsoft were to try to utilize Windows to power such a platform, their developers would soon discover how laughable Windows is for such a solution. Not that Microsoft isn't smart, but the culture of Google lends itself much better to success in this field than the culture of Microsoft.
I am, however, looking forward to Microsoft going up against them, as it will allow us to point out yet another failure in them trying to move beyond their core business.
I don't agree (Score:3, Interesting)
They can't practically do a full search across everyone's email for a particular keyword. To do so, the providers need to offer this kind of service, which they haven't been built to do (data persistence, indexing etc.). Alternatively, the FBI/CIA could just install snooping boxes at network hubs, but again this isn't practical for realtime searches given the volume of mail going around the world every day.
On the other hand, Gmail is (the first system yet) specifically designed to make searching across its datastore as easy as searching the web. Now, for the first time, large scale email snooping is practical. The FBI/CIA can just get a special privilege account from Google, with the ability to search everyone's email for keywords just like we do now when searching the web.
Laws don't mean much if enforcing them is impractical. Gmail and similar systems if they catch on make new laws practical.
New & Interesting Search Technology - vivisimo (Score:4, Interesting)
http://vivisimo.com/ [vivisimo.com]
Google going downhill? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The problem I see with Gmail privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
Additionally, how are Hotmail and Yahoo going to have to 'work for it' when reading your mail? Hotmail and Yahoo have the same accessibility to your messages as Google will/does.
GMail and Attachments (Score:0, Interesting)
And besides, why should Google do this!? They are the ones giving out a Gig. If I want to send a friend the ISO of Debian Disc 1, why should Google stop me? Why be choosy about how I use the Gig? Again, I didn't ask them to give out Gigs. They freely chose to. Let's remember: Don't be evil.
Re:GMail and Attachments (Score:1, Interesting)
4.2MB Attachment accepted.
13.2MB Attachment rejected.
Narrowing it down...
He doesn't answer (Score:2, Interesting)
One, Silverstein acknowledges that AI problems are basically hopeless (gonna take "about 200 to 300 years").
Two, when asked if PageRank is dead and what they are doing to fight false popularity, he says they are "tweaking it in new ways".
Three, when asked how ("do you have algorithms?) he answers,
OK, they are looking at the anchor text. Then what? As long as HTML is the language, I'm afraid there aren't that many more things they can do.Time to cash in, perhaps?
Re:Secrecy (Score:5, Interesting)
So, if you keep track, Google interviews contain almost no information, and are mainly public relations exercises. Vague statements about the corporate culture, some well-aligned musings about the company's future direction, and oh look at the time, the interview's over.
I suspect most of their searches are done by an Amiga behind the coffee bar.
Re:Google Spam (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed! I wrote a blog [insubstantial.com.au] entry [insubstantial.com.au] about this the other day and emailed it off to Google as well. Basically I suggest a preference to exclude sites selling stuff and exclude training courses (as well as wishing for improved indexing and ranking for content in Wiki's...)
Re:GMail and Attachments (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:40k? Not quite (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Google Spam (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think the spammers can be actually selling the cards; they presumably want to bring you in just to show banners or to sell something else. I suspect the spammers got the product name by gobbling up HP's site or some other reseller.
Anyhow, here is an amusing conspiracy theory: Google are happy for product keywords to get totally spammed out, because it makes it more likely that people will just click the paid links. They might not be the best value, but at least you know they're enough of a real business to pay their advertising bills.
Of course this is a bit tough if you don't actually want to buy the thing, but just to find the manual or drivers or linux support information.
I don't think Google are really doing this, because they seem to be sticking to "don't be evil so far".
Re:The problem I see with Gmail privacy (Score:3, Interesting)
Try proving it though.
I work for a data recovery outfit that specializes in electronic evidence, and let me assure you that we can give it a damn good try, and we know a lot more about it than you do.
You have to really know what you're doing if you want to get rid of data permanently. Even if you're not one of those nice but dim folks who think deleting a file means it's gone.... So you end up before the judge, trying to explain away destruction of evidence, getting smacked with sanctions for spoliation of evidence [fact-index.com], and expanding your vocabulary with wonderful new terms like consciousness of guilt. Don't be a Martha!
In my own cynical opinion, there's basically nothing an average person can do to prevent their personal information from being seized in litigation and/or by law enforcement. Kept all your data on your own machine? They'll cart it away. Encrypted your data? They'll subpeona the password. Your lawyers have to be much better than theirs, and most people just can't afford that kind of representation. Your best chance is to try to stay below the radar.
The man who *made* Google tick..? (Score:4, Interesting)
The DoT, namely C.S., used to be on the list of Google Executives [google.com].
Any comment on *this*, I mean...hello? Mr. Brin? Mr. Page?
Did Mr. Silverstein just dematerialize or what?
"In an interview before Google's IPO filing, Silverstein discussed [...]"
*yawn*
Re:If you want to know more... (Score:3, Interesting)
If I only I had applied...
Re:How long can Google maintain? (Score:3, Interesting)
If Microsoft wanted to they could develop clean interfaces too. Microsoft's reputation is not that bad, except that it is known that they don't play nice with others.
But still, if they do develop a worthwhile engine, on par with Google or better (they have very good researchers, they are certainly capable of coming up with something) and put it as the default search engine in the next version of Windows and the next service patches, then Google could find itself in trouble.
Microsoft has tremendous leverage with its users by virtue of most of them not being very educated and not caring about interfaces all that much as long as it sort of works.
Still valid points (Score:4, Interesting)
My points are still valid, even if my psuedo-code is not 100% correct -- but you miss my point: any of the large webmail providers (Yahoo, Hotmail, etc) will still be able to search all the email in any users mailboxes, almost as easily you can log-in on their respective homepages. It would be a fallacy to think otherwise. Of course, these services already do -- just like Gmail -- have one huge store for all their users' mail, even if it is distributed, as you mention.
It is my belief, gained through knowledge of mail servers -- and too many years real-world experience writing high-end web-services/front-ends of one kind or another -- that SQL is the most scalable solution for the back-end of a web-based email system with this quantity of users, the idea of using any kind of file based mailstore is unpractical for web-based email for a number of technical reasons.
Furthermore, if I remember correctly, in the past I have read articles about the big webmail provider's back-end systems being SQL based (sorry, I can't remember which company the article was about -- I think I've read about more than one..(?)).
Your analogy about searching everyone's email is moot: we are not really talking about searching everyone's email spool, rather, people are arguing over whether Google's webmail -- Gmail -- is any less private than any of the other big webmail solutions (Yahoo, Hotmail) that are already out there -- and it's not. It's no better, and no worse -- but they are being more upfront about things (i.e. explicit about their business/technical processes) in their privacy policy than some of the other providers care to be, which has brought this matter into the eyes of the general user (who probably do not realise that when they click 'Delete' on Hotmail, a copy of their message may indeed still reside on another of Hotmail's systems in an archived backup, unaccessible to the all but the sysadmins -- and the respective law enforcement agents/agencies, if they have the right paperwork).
In this statement (and possibly inferred in some other statements) you make it sound like Gmail/Google will index everyone's mail-server's mailstores like it indexes webpages -- it won't. Gmail only indexes the mail of Gmail users.