Month: March 2005

I’ve been sitting on this all day because I could not get confirmation, but damned if it doesn’t come in an email from Google. I shoulda run with the tip I got from a loyal reader….in any case, Google has purchased a web analytics company with serious enterprise mojo.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – March 28, 2005 – Google Inc. today announced it

has agreed to acquire Urchin Software Corporation, a San Diego,

California based web analytics company.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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As you get bigger, you are a major target, and Google’s legal department must feel more overworked than Calamity Jane’s liver (Deadwood reference alert…)

The Times (reg rq’d) reports. Joi summarizes.

I wrote of Indeed a while back, when it was pre-launch, today it launches. Expect to hear more and more about this trend – domain-focused crawls with innovative front ends. I saw one at PCForum which launches tonight, will have write up later….Also, in the same vein as Indeed is SimplyHired, recently launched as well.

The Washington Post runs an overview (reg req’rd) of the major desktop search tools. Good for any of you who have held back on installing any of them. I for one installed a Blinkx beta some time ago (the only one for Mac I could find) and it ate so much processing power I had to take it offline. Sigh.

Om summarizes nicely.

Charlene Li has a write up over here…

Interesting insights from a Google engineer.

There is, by and large, only one code base at Google.  This has many advantages.  Most obvious is that it is really easy to look at and contribute to code in other projects without having to talk to anyone, get special permissions or fill out forms in triplicate.  That is just the tip of the iceberg, though.  Having one codebase means that there is a very high degree of code sharing.  Need to base 64 encode/decode something?  No problem, there is a standard Google routine for that.  Found a bug?  Just fix it and check it in after getting it code reviewed by a documented owner.  One of the reasons that environments like Perl, Python, C#, Java, etc. flourish is that they have large and well through out libraries of useful code.  For a variety of reasons, C++ has never had this. …

… The intranet in Google is super transparent.  Teams are actively encouraged to share the most intimate details of their projects with the rest of the company.  This happens through tech talks, design docs, lunch table conversations, etc.  When two teams are doing similar things, people start with the assumption that they must have their reasons and that the situation will be worked out in time.  There isn’t a huge push to over optimize and have only one solution for each problem.

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