With the recent press about Cuil, the latest “Google-Killer Search Engine”, it seems that we’ve forgotten the lessons from the late 90s. Cuil’s claim to fame appears to be: It was founded by Ex-Googlers They claim to have a larger web-page index than Google The first point is somewhat interesting, but not exactly a path [...]

Yes, folks, it’s true. April 11th, almost three years after my first day as a Googler (or “Noogler”), was my last day. Did I hate it? Did something go horribly wrong? Did the company completely change? No no, nothing like that. I loved Google. It’s a fantastic company, particularly for engineers. You’re driving the products, [...]

I’m embarrassed to admit that I almost fell for Gmail custom time. I thought “oh, that’s sort of sketchy”… and then I quickly remembered it’s April Fools day. Nice try, guys . I think this is my favorite testimonial: “I used to be an honest person; but now I don’t have to be. It’s just [...]

I’ve gone a little bit form happy today. Google Docs just announced today the introduction of forms in Google Spreadsheets. Oh, happy day… Prior to this, I had a simple little form app that I wrote. It wasn’t great, but it kind-of-sort-of did the trick. There were two versions that I used for Seattle Anti-Freeze:1) [...]

Google Seattle/Kirkland is running its tech talk series with speaking from inside and outside of Google. Here’s the lineup: February 21, 20086:30 – 9:00 PM Web Archives & Interfaces for Social Studies of Online ActionKirsten Foot, Associate Professor of Communication, UW Register Now March 20, 20086:30-9:00 PM Here Come The RobotsHelen Greiner, Co-founder and Chairman, [...]

[UPDATE: I emailed Linking for Dollars and they have now updated their code to include the rel="nofollow" attribute. They now fall within the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Nice work!] Much like I nod my head to the inventor of Pet rocks, I would nod to whoever came up with Facebook gifts. If you can get people [...]

My laptop, which I fear is on its last legs, got a little servicing today from Dell. It’d been blue screening frequently since, well, since Dell last visited me two months ago (broken fan -> overheating laptop). I’m going to assume that’s just a coincidence, although the timing is suspicious… I tried reinstalling windows first, [...]

Barack Obama is speaking at Google today. Supposedly, Eric Schmidt explained his speaking at Google was kind of like an interview. When we interview candidates at Google, we like to ask technical questions. Schmidt: What’s the fastest way to sort 32 bit numbers?Barack: Not bubble-sort. Sure, we’d expect a little more from a technical candidate, [...]

Yesterday was my intern’s last day, and we took Julia out for an amazing sushi lunch (so… much… sushi…) to say goodbye. She did a great job this summer on all three projects. The first two I can’t talk about unfortunately because it’s a confidential project – but I can provide a detailed look into [...]

The Seattle Scalability Conference was held on June 23rd in Bellevue. One person posted their notes a while back, and videos of some of the talks were recently made available. Enjoy! Scaling Google for Every User by Marissa Mayer Abstractions for Handling Large Datasets by Jeff Dean MapReduce Used on Large Data Sets by Barry [...]