Quotes about Google

If your life's story were written, would you read it?

Sometimes we guard people from the truth to protect them from being hurt, but by doing that we only hurt them more in the long run.

You kiss the back of my neck

I'm spinning to the ground

You run your strong fingers down my back

I can't hear a sound

You whisper things to me

So sweet I can taste your words

You're so close to me

I can feel our souls touching

You draw circles in my palm

Your love warms me to my toes, this I will never forget.

You loved me even if it was only for a minute

I hold onto that minute every night

You needed me even if only for a moment

I still hold onto that moment inside.

I think Google's founders are both a couple of guys with some high ideals which have been to some degree reflected in the way the company has been run in terms of its having a very good workplace and good employee programs, and now that they're going public they want in some ways to be able to ensure that that kind of approach continues. So they've effectively put in place this notion of "Don't Be Evil".

Now I think there are number of problems with that. The first one is: what is evil and who is going to be deciding what evil is? You can go a long way in terms of putting in various kinds of relatively normal employment practices without it being evil. Obviously if you're paying people slave wages and whatnot that would be evil, so that's the first question, but the second and I think the more profound question is: how is that idea of "Don't Be Evil" going to fit with the legally-compelled mandate of the directors and of the managers of that company to serve the best interest of the shareholders of that company? And that I think is where the problem lies. "Don't Be Evil" is a nice kind of phrase, kind of mission statement, kind of notion. But ultimately there's a legal duty and a legal obligation on the part of the company's directors and managers to do whatever needs to be done to ensure that the best interest of the shareholders are served, and that means the best financial interest of the shareholders.

I think Google's founders are both a couple of guys with some high ideals which have been to some degree reflected in the way the company has been run in terms of its having a very good workplace and good employee programs, and now that they're going public they want in some ways to be able to ensure that that kind of approach continues. So they've effectively put in place this notion of "Don't Be Evil".

Now I think there are number of problems with that. The first one is: what is evil and who is going to be deciding what evil is? You can go a long way in terms of putting in various kinds of relatively normal employment practices without it being evil. Obviously if you're paying people slave wages and whatnot that would be evil, so that's the first question, but the second and I think the more profound question is: how is that idea of "Don't Be Evil" going to fit with the legally-compelled mandate of the directors and of the managers of that company to serve the best interest of the shareholders of that company? And that I think is where the problem lies. "Don't Be Evil" is a nice kind of phrase, kind of mission statement, kind of notion. But ultimately there's a legal duty and a legal obligation on the part of the company's directors and managers to do whatever needs to be done to ensure that the best interest of the shareholders are served, and that means the best financial interest of the shareholders.

Google started in 1998, at a time when Yahoo! Seemed to have a stranglehold on the search business – and if Yahoo! Stumbled, then AltaVista or Lycos looked certain to be the last man standing.  But within a couple of years, Google had become the default search engine for anyone who used the internet regularly, simply because it was able to do a better job of finding the right page quickly.  And the way it does that – and does it while surveying three billion Web pages – is built on the wisdom of crowds.

            Google keeps the details of it’s technology to itself, but the core of the Google system is the PageRank algorithm, which was first defined by the company’s founders, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, in a now-legendary 1998 paper called “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.”  PageRank is an algorithm – a calculating method – that attempts to let all the Web pages on the Internet decide which pages are most relevant to a particular search.  Here’s how Google puts it:

PageRank capitalizes on the uniquely democratic characteristic of the web by using it’s vast link structure as an organizational tool.  In essence, Google interprets a link from  page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.  Google assesses a page’s importance by the votes it receives.  But Google looks at more than sheer volume of votes, or links; it also analyses the page that casts the vote.  Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

In that 0.12 seconds, what Google is doing is asking the entire Web to decide which page contains the most useful information, and the page that gets the most votes goes first on the list.  And that page, or the one immediately beneath it, more often than not is in fact the one with the most useful information.

            Now, Google is a republic, not a perfect democracy.  As the description says, the more people that have linked to a page, the more influence that page has on the final decision.  The final vote is a “weighted average” – just as stock price or an NFL point spread is – rather than a simple average like the ox-weighers’ estimate.  Nonetheless, the big sites that have the more influence over the crowd’s final verdict have that influence only because of all the votes that smaller sites have given them.  If smaller sites were giving the wrong sites too much influence, Google’s search results would not be accurate.  In the end, the crowd still rules.  To be smart at the top, the system has to be smart all the way through.

Google’s a strange place. When I met Eric Schmidt, he said, “If you are kind to everybody, then you will make good decisions because people will give you good information, and if you are truthful to everybody, they will be truthful to you.” That’s what’s different about Google. They screw up and make mistakes, but they genuinely mean the good stuff about “don’t be evil.”

One percent of the equity, 1 percent of the profits, and 1 percent of the people go into Google.org. The most important asset isn’t money, it’s people. One percent of the people means 60 or 70 of the smartest people in the world trying to solve some of the biggest problems in the world.

We are focused on features, not products. We eliminated future products that would have made the complexity problem worse. We don't want to have 20 different products that work in 20 different ways. I was getting lost at our site keeping track of everything. I would rather have a smaller set of products that have a shared set of features.

Google is free PR. Make it work for you.

Google has the search-engine goods on just about everyone.

Google is the new Big Brother.

This intelligence, or what I'll call "the wisdom of crowds," is at work in the world in many different guises. It's the reason the Internet search engine Google can scan a billion Web pages and find the one page that has the exact piece of information you were looking for. It's the reason it's so hard to make money betting on NFL games, and it helps explain why, for the past fifteen years, a few hundred amateur traders in the middle of Iowa have done a better job of predicting election results than Gallup polls have.