Google Story

New non-fiction this week included The Google Story. The latter half covers a bunch of the financial stuff, but the early chapters are quite entertaining for those who like stories and anecdotes of nerds with a mission.

Bits of fun trivia included:

- When they used Michelangelo's David for the L in a stone-carved Google logo to commemorate the artist's birthday, someone who though they were changing the corporate logo wrote them an email saying "Rockman sucks!". (see http://www.google.com/holidaylogos03.html)

- For a while, they were getting anonymous emails that contained single numbers: 37, 43, etc. They finally figured out that someone was counting the number of words on their home page and tracking the changes.

- The guy who works on the filters to keep unwanted content from inadvertently appearing in your searches is known as "Porn Cookie Guy", due to the nature of his job and the fact that he handed out homemade cookies to coworkers.

- In early (well before Google was a household word) observational studies of user behavior, they told users to go to the site and try to reasearch a topic. They were confused by users who would type in the site URL and then sit and wait. So many people did this that they finally started asking why, to which the user's replied "I'm waiting for the page to finish loading". They were so used to the extremely noisy pages, that they figured it was just stuck and still loading.

The first half of the book is a fun read for just about anyone. The latter chapters will appeal to the business-minded.