Randomness Redefined

Well I have managed to catch my first cold of the year and on my “break” as well. :/

I spent most of it working on the corupt filesystem of an iBook. You can see the rest of the photos over here and all of my photos over at flickr.

While I was at work I had this interesting chat with some unknown person:

Brett: Hi, my name is Brett from MWA Inc. How may I help you today?
Cust: Brett, Please send me an icecream maker. White Mountian 6 qt. Thanks Stuart
Cust:
: Chat ended by customer

I have absolutely no clue how they expect me to do that as we 1. Do not make Ice Cream Makers 2. Why would you buy an Ice Cream maker from a chat window when you can just go to Wally World, etc 3. Why can’t all the questions I receive all day be this easy?

*Note to self* Create a geek or geekyness category to file stuff like this under. i would hope by now anyone reading this would know that I was not being serious by the title of this post, but just in case I’m just letting you know I was NOT serious in my belief that God created Google but that would have been interesting for like day 37 or something. This is just a joke between Erik an myself. Anyways, I fount this article entitled An evening with Google over on the blog of someone named Alan Williamson. He had the opportunity to attend a talk given by Marissa Mayer, who is the Product Manager for Google and these are some of the notable facts that he posted and I found them so fascinating i thought I would quote them all so you could know them as well. And that is her picture to the right there. Also, as I am a devote worshiper of the cult of Google I just HAD to post it. I would not want to anger the potential overlords of the world by not giving them some free marketing. ;P Here are those interesting facts that emerged from the talk (Dammit i wish I could attend cool events like this. :():

1. The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. In fact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.
2. Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.
3. One of the biggest leap in search usage came about when they introduced their much improved spell checker giving birth to the “Did you mean…” feature. This instantly doubled their traffic, but they had some interesting discussions on how best to place that information, as most people simply tuned that out. But they discovered the placement at the bottom of the results was the most effective area.
4. The infamous “I feel lucky” is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.
5. Orkut is very popular in Brazil. Orkut was the brainchild of a very intelligent Google engineer who was pretty much given free reign to run with it, without having to go through the normal Google UI procedures, hence the reason it doesn’t look or feel like a Google application. They are looking at improving Orkut to cope with the loads it places on the system.
6. Google makes changes small-and-often. They will sometimes trial a particular feature with a set of users from a given network subnet; for example Excite@Home users often get to see new features. They aren’t told of this, just presented with the new UI and observed how they use it.
7. Google has the largest network of translators in the world
8. They use the 20% / 5% rules. If at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the ‘Advanced Preferences’.
9. They have found in user testing, that a small number of people are very typical of the larger user base. They run labs continually and always monitoring how people use a page of results.
10. The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’
11. Gmail was used internally for nearly 2years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.
12. They listen to feedback actively. Emailing Google isn’t emailing a blackhole.
13. Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this working model.
14. This wasn’t a technical talk so no information regarding any infrastructure was presented however they did note that they have a mantra of aiming to give back each page with in 500ms, rendered.
15. Quote: Give Users What They Want When They Want It
16. Quote: Integrate Sensibly