Trying to get a job at Google is ridiculous, so many interviews. They even have this GLAT, Google Labs Aptitude Test. Check it out, some of the questions are really hard.

So forget that. I'm going to work at 7-Eleven, a popular 24/7 convenience store in the US.

To my dismay, though, there is a standardized test on the back of 7-Eleven's application:

Basic Math Skills

1. A customer purchased items in your store totaling $12.64. They hand you three $5.00 bills. How much change would you owe them?


2. You owe a customer $1.38 in change. What bills and coins would you give back to the customer as correct change?


3. You currently have 12 bottles of water on your shelf, and want to keep a minimum level of 6 bottles at all times. You average sales of 2 bottles per day. What is the minimum number you would order for enough bottles for 7 days?


4. Your store sells 6 hot dogs per day. How many hot dogs would you order for a two weeks supply?


5. A customer asks for two money orders. The first is for the amount of $637.24 and the second is for $25.76. If there is a $1.00 charge for each money order, what is the total amount the customer would owe you?

Sweet! These are the kind of math questions I had in middle school that boosted my confidence. None are trick questions either!

Does anybody even use Google anymore? I spend most of my info-hunting on Wikipedia now. (Just kidding, but there are some elements of truth to this)

At the height of the dot-com boom in 1999, when companies were spending their time talking about gathering "eyeballs" and building up "brands," some hippie-like geeks proposed the Cluetrain Manifesto. It's a statement that urges businesses to get a clue and start treating customers like people rather than cattle and treat the Internet like a conversation instead of another marketing platform.

That Google has suceeded ridiculously well with a "Don't Be Evil" policy and that the dot-com's crashed soon after "cluetrain" may be a testament to the power of a Cluetrain-like form of business.

Yesterday Google applied for an Initial Public Offering, and this is what their filing says:

The letter states, among other things, that 1. We don't need to do this for the money; 2. We have no plans to run our business to satisfy Wall Street's need for smooth earnings predictability; 3. We plan to give no earnings guidance, not at least as it's understood on Wall St.; 4. Don't ask us to do so, we'll simply decline the request; 5. We'll do odd things that you won' t understand; 6. We will make big bets on things that may not work out; 7. We run the company as a triumvirate, so there will not be clear leadership from one person like most other companies; 8. We bridge the media and tech industries (interesting), which are in flux, so we've chosen a two-class stock structure similar to the NYT, WashPost, and NYT that helps us avoid being taken over by those forces; 9. We plan using an auction model, as it feels fairer and we understand auctions from AdWords; 10. Don't invest in us if this scares you at all, or the price feels too high; 11. Don't even think about asking us to cut expenses with regard to our employees; 12. We believe in the idea of Don't Be Evil; 13. It's evil to pay for placement or inclusion (a swipe at Yahoo); 14. We hope to bridge the digital divide through Gmail type free services and a foundation with at least 1% of profits and equity to help make the world a better place; 17. Betting on Google is a bet on Sergey and Larry (this was said multiple times, making me wonder if there wasn't some odd future blame being assigned here by the VCs or bankers); 18. This letter is our way of answering the questions we can't answer in the coming months due to the IPO quiet period.

This is a revolutionary statement coming from a business. The tone of this announcement is not from a CEO hungry for money but more like a professor attempting to float some idealistic, utopian vision of capitalism. I found it cluetrain-like in its rejection of the standard "corporation as shark" mentality.

However, it can be interpreted as arrogance: Sergey and Larry are practically saying, "We are God, and we know it. So back off."

Everything about Google can be duplicated. There is no market lock-in like eBay or Microsoft. I don't know how their IPO will fare, but I do know that the genius or arrogance of their filing letter will depend immensly on circumstances over the next three years. (Lifted from bOING bOING)

I was going through my old entries, categorizing them, and I realized that I have so many entries talking about Google. I even created a separate category for it, and I think by the time I'm done archiving, I'll have 20 entries in it over the course of my blog. This is a big deal because when I create categories, I try to pick things of cultural significance, like Orwell, philosophy, and emotional intelligence.

And this process made me think, we shouldn't look at Google as a company anymore. We should put Google on the same plane as social institution. No wait, that's too small. We should treat them on the order of magnitude the way that the Greeks treated their Oracles. Hell, they even deserve a place of worship side-by-side the Internet itself. There's the Internet and then there's Google, two separate, yet intertwined, and equally powerful components.

When we speak about them going public, or them having to work on financials, or other minutae, it seems to demean them into just another "dot-com." Really we should treat them with the same interest that we treat the sanctiity of TCP/IP.

What action should this entail? I'm not sure, but I'm just trying to clear the air that, "A Company, Google is Not." A cultural icon, perhaps, but more like a group brain we all feed into.

Seth Godin with the help of my friend Ramit has put together an interesting and thick eBook to answer the question, "What should Google Do"

These are the most interesting suggestions submitted in the book that I've found:

If I ran Google, one thing I would do is create some incredibly awful search
engines under another name so people would still be thrilled with the simplicity and focus Google offers. (Page 53)

LOL

I’ll just make it simple. For every search you do, 1 cent goes to an investment fund for long term poverty eradication and empowerment. Like the fund that we are in the loop to build up. There is in global interest of having poverty eradicated. My mind is all too set on it to think of anything more than above :). (page 69)

Leave it pretty much as it is. Why try to improve on perfection? (page 76)

Many of the other suggestions were along the lines of re-incorporating things that already exist and are lukewarm, such as dating and paid news-aggregation. A lot of talk was made about "personalized" searches... I have a bad intuition about this. And others were trying to find fancy ways of mixing Blogging with Googling...

Also, this eBook compilation concept is fantastic. Why don't more ppl do it? I also like the landscape PDF format, heck a lot of the PDFs out there are browsed, not printed and read offline... this one I found easy to just click page-down-page up on...

UPDATE: continuing on the ..., even if landscape PDFs are printed, what's wrong with people reading stuff landscape style offline?

Google Dance - Basically there are monthly sweeps that take several days in which Google updates its index, and during these periods search results alternate between the old index and new index.

Good stuff inside for the curious

I think I figured out why Google bought Blogger. Because of this... Google AdSense. Basically all those text ads that you see on websites, now smaller-scale websites can start peddling click-through ads on their site and recieve small disbursments. These guys over at the Google Weblog get ~$1,000/mo. from it.

So what's the big scheme? Well, think of it this way. Google first makes money off click-throughs from regular searches. But now, since Bloggers have become significantly responsible for what bubbles up in PageRank, Google will be able to make $ from a second round of click-throughs from people visiting the blogs at the top of their searches.

Plus, finally Google comes to the rescue with offering a way to allow bloggers to make money blogging, which provide tremendous incentive for bloggers to quit their day job (which is usually unemployment) and become serious information bombs, thus revitalizing the net, thus improving the quality of the searches on Google. And then, bloggers will leave their lame radioluserland and moveabletype setups and join the Blogger group, helping increasing $ for pro-blogger users, and also increasing adsense revenue for Google.

It's so good it's beautiful.

As a side note, BloggerPRO seems to lag behind other tools out there, and their setup is flaky at times. Google's search quality has also been lagging recently. But hey, I'm looking forward to blogging and $ to go together... then I can get Really serious about this stuff.

go to google.com and type "weapons of mass destruction" then "I'm Feeling Lucky"

I entered the Google Puzzle Championships. I then checked their site, and it said, "If you scored above 150, we sent you an e-mail" I was like woah! I only got like 10 points! Can't believe I thought I had a shot at this. Check it out.

Summary of problems with googlewashing. I had this internal debate regarding how the phrase "Second Superpower" got googlewashed by this guy. The Register and /. was whining about this, but then I thought what was the problem in this? A majority of bloggers decided hey, this was a great site, and therefore it deserved to be number 1. Also, theoretically, if somebody were to search for the second superpower, a good chance is that their intention IS to find this particular article. So, why is it unfair that this new definition get credit for the meaning of the term Second Superpower. I think the primary argument is that it's just "not right."

And so, there's the rub. The PageRank is a battle-ground for morality. By the fact that Google can determine through ranking what a particular term means and what content informs that term's definition, Google now has a deeper reach than just teacher. It's gone from library-alternative to higher-education substitute to now meme-shaper. Does Google have a certain social responsibility? I gather from reading their About-Pages that they uphold some vague semblance of values, such as roller-blading to work and not letting suits interfere with the nerds. This, I think is a start, because the suits tend to follow money which is, as they say, the root of all evil. Nerds, on the other hand, at least follow some vague techno-uptopian thinking where they're the benevolent dictators of a machine-like righteousness that's part meritocracy, part libertarian. So, I'd take a nerd morality over a suit morality. But given this moral responsibilty that Google has on search terms, how exactly are they supposed to act on it?

What's the framework on thinking about this?

One way of thinking is, "people should be able to find what they're looking for."

Okay, that's fine, I think a link democracy is a way to start. But, what if they don't know what they're looking for. If I search for "second superpower" and I'm trying to find that particular thing I heard about, then yeah, that was the right ranking. But what if I'm some kid in high school, doing some research on superpowers, and this comes up?

Is the PageRank morality going to always be inevitably flawed because we have little idea of what the intention of the searcher is?

And you can't say, well, you want to give the majority of the people what they want to read--you could be inappropriately re-defining a term based on a tyranny of the majority.

Should weights be given to certain domains? Like if a Stanford professor's definition of "neurotheology" is manifested in a paper that's not widely linked, should that get a higher PageRank than a teenager's fan page on "neurotheology and rock n' roll" that gets popularly linked by bloggers and his friends?

The question is, what is the right array of results for a given term? I emphasize the word right because it brings about an emerging area of information-morality that is probably going to become important en route to the Singularity.

The Google Art creator

Google Corporate Information: Google History At the Googleplex, a unique company culture was evolving. To maximize the flexibility of the work space, large rubber exercise balls were repurposed as highly mobile office chairs in an open environment free of cubicle walls. While computers on the desktops were fully powered, the desks themselves were wooden doors held up by pairs of sawhorses.

As much as I'm on a I-despise-google (yet-use-it-all-the-time) high, I find affinity with this comment. I did almost exactly the same thing, using two sawhorses and a door as a sleeping platform in my 2nd Odyssey. I initially bought some wood from Home Depot, only to find that its stench made me sneeze. I delayed my trip a couple of days, hoping the smell would disappear, but I got impatient and the smell never faded. Then I thought, "improvise, improvise" and voila, now I'm like Google? Dah.

It's exciting because it's a hero-legend story, or at least starts that way. You read every part and you're like, damn, damn, damn, each and every point seems extremely romantic and fun. You also start to feel good because of it's style. Given the current drivel of Corporate America, Google sounds like a m'fing rebellion against the crap out there. But really, the real lesson, is you have to find your own way, as Fleetwood Mac would say (dah!), and no matter how many Google's you join or how many garage start-ups you make, if it's not you, your dig, your innovative little crazy diamond to shine on, then you will never taste it as much as the Google guys probably did.

(Verdict, now we're like, lamenting, still Nietzsche didactic like, but whatever, enjoy :-P <- Woody Allen influenced, maybe?)

I no a fe th th do sp

1) no lon underdog.

2) Pur Blogger a la Geocit

3) PR news.google.com arr

4) The ner complain Google.

5) culti

6) hah roller

no re-inv

How Total Information Awareness will dupe Google - "TIA promises search engines that will consign Google to the Stone Age. TIA's dialog technology will listen to your words, then link you to a trove of data that makes today's Web look like the library of an illiterate."
a) scary.
b) what's the problem people have with Total Information Awareness anyways? Religion, political correctness, punishment of the outspoken, and a general desire to be "liked" have already put a "filter" on acceptable and appropriate thinking.
c) do I really think that the government could match Google? Based on the government's fubaring of a simple Dungeons and Dragons war game I somewhat question their ability to trump Google. And if other companies, like Microsoft and Yahoo! can't surpass Google, how could the US government.
d) this is just like the RIAA touting "PressPlay" to win the war on "Internet-terrorism" i.e. music piracy.
e) by the time they finish a system that scans e-mails and what not, there'll be new systems of communication that'll be unbounded, secure chat, anonymous blogging, the matrix?
f) by the nature of the reaction within this article, I get a feeling a lot of people will be pissed off. It seems too challenging for a right-wing press-mongering machine to write an opposite story. "Look America, we're all going to be safer now!" Plus, if enough people are pissed off, all we need is the next voting cycle to change everything.
g) yet, by the very nature of my litany of doubts on the US government, after a few self-fulfilling prophecies later, I could end up being sooo wrong.
h) nonetheless, I'm always impressed by man's ability to accept things the "way they are." If such a system were proposed by Bush, "for the good of the United States, mankind,
God's will on this very Earth, and an end to (brown) evil doers, we must sacrifice," the future will still be gay, but it will be gay within a sandbox. I and you already live in a sandbox by the very nature of needing things to survive in this world, so that's not that big of a deal. Plus, I know people who have told me that, "I wouldn't mind livin without control as long as I'm happy." hrmph.
i) so, on the balance, I'm vaguely against this TIA thing, in which case, I take solace in a thing that Americans lack: a fear of the use of violence. Piss off Americans, and they will fire.