They crawl news sites (or just subscribe to their RSS feeds) and cluster (http://www.elet.polimi.it/upload/matteucc/Clustering/tutorial_html/) the stories they find, hence identifying which ones are talking about the same thing. You can take advantage of the fact that most news sites will classify each story into a section (Google probably maps each site’s section breakdown to their own) so you can group the different story clusters that way too.

Of course the implementation will be non-trivial, and there will be fine tuning, but the concept is pretty simple.

Philipp later took this one back, saying he’d mistaken it. Very interesting all the same. A few other noteworthy bits:

- his Gmail account storage limit is 1 TB.
- “After being asked what it takes to get fired at Google, Zorba replies that abusing logins is a fireable offense.” Especially if you get anywhere near the log system. Which makes sense … the “database of intentions” is that log, and there’s a *lot* of information there that Google likes having, doesn’t want getting out, and doesn’t want insiders abusing.
- Zorba says it was depressing to be able to use Google Maps [before it was launched], but not be able to print out routes to take them along as that might breach confidentiality. (I’d agree, and frankly, I’d think if it’s only a few weeks away, what if a few people see it. so what?)

And the anecdote about Larry and Sergey with a laptop + webcam strapped to a remote-control jeep is funny.