Google: The Early Years

March 23, 2007 3:02 PM

Backrub was Google's predecessor. Ealier versions of Google. The original hardware, featuring the disk cabinet built of lego, now on display in the Gates building at Stanford University.
posted by PercussivePaul (18 comments total)

[sniff] Our little search engine's all growed up!

This is great, thank you.
posted by adamrice at 3:30 PM on March 23, 2007

Those are mega blocks or some sort of knock off. I suppose that's how they got ahead of the other search engines who were wasting all their money on Lego brand building blocks.
posted by Gary at 3:44 PM on March 23, 2007 [2 favorites]

You gotta get up ealy to to make a better search engine than Google.
posted by The Deej at 3:48 PM on March 23, 2007

It's a good thing they changed their name. Imagine how awkward it would be to tell someone you backrubbed them.
posted by me & my monkey at 3:49 PM on March 23, 2007 [2 favorites]

I bet Richard Otcasek gets up pretty ealy.
posted by sklero at 3:51 PM on March 23, 2007

For Ealy?
posted by joseph_elmhurst at 3:57 PM on March 23, 2007

So nowadays creepy guys in offices come up behind female coworkers and give them unwanted googles?
posted by drjimmy11 at 4:01 PM on March 23, 2007 [2 favorites]

Great stuff, thanks for this post. I especially enjoyed reading The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. No, seriously.
posted by chudmonkey at 4:06 PM on March 23, 2007

If you liked the PageRank paper, you'd love these classic Google papers:

GFS
MapReduce
Bigtable

(Bigtable is comparatively recent and doesn't really count as "The Early Years" but GFS and MapReduce have been around since the very beginning.

(And if you really love this stuff, we're always hiring -- drop me a line...)
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 4:21 PM on March 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

You know, I have pretty hairy forearms myself, but that logo creeps me out.
posted by Citizen Premier at 4:49 PM on March 23, 2007

I think it's very instructive to see that the Spartan, functional Google page we're all familiar with was the product of a lengthy process of revision. You'd think simplicity would be simple. But often, it's not.
posted by Western Infidels at 5:22 PM on March 23, 2007

now on display in the Gates building

That's gotta burn.
posted by Afroblanco at 5:25 PM on March 23, 2007

lupus_yonderboy, I'd love to (not in the computing area; another division), but there's no email in your profile..
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 5:46 PM on March 23, 2007

There's a website in his profile which has his e-mail address.
posted by PercussivePaul at 6:12 PM on March 23, 2007

Wow, if I only had a brain.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 6:25 PM on March 23, 2007

in the Gates building...?
zing!

on preview: what afroblanco said
posted by ruwan at 6:45 PM on March 23, 2007

Unfortunately, Google's fairly straight when it comes to hiring non-technical people. :-(

I thought when I got a job there I'd find all these fun crazies but (and on hindsight it's obvious) there are a lot of hard-working, dedicated, decent, rather straight people with families and all, and very few crazed psychedelic weirdos at all.

You can rest assured that there are a lot of very smart, ethical people there trying to do good things, but don't think that there are a lot of way-out hipsters, 'cause it just ain't the case.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 8:45 PM on March 23, 2007

in the Gates building...?
zing!

Curious that Google was built on Linux, and the web had its origins on a NeXT Cube (aka Apple OS X in waiting).

Is it possible that Microsoft is just incompatible with the Internet?
posted by humblepigeon at 9:34 AM on March 24, 2007