Category: Book Related

Not directly tied to search, but I was fortunate enough to get an early copy of Stephen Johnson’s new book Mind Wide Open: Your Brain And The Neuroscience Of Everyday Life, which is now out. As Cory points out, it’s from a guy who many of us revere for elegantly relating Big Ideas. The book does a superb job of relating new thinking about…thinking, and in particular emotions such as love, fear, and joy. A very worthy read, and an inspiration for folks like me struggling to write a book related to Big Ideas.

One of the purposes of my book is to expand the concept of what “search” means in everyday life. We’ve come to think that search = Google, and Google = search. But what of luggage? Of inventory? Of….Rental cars? In this disturbing NYT piece, Christopher Elliott tells the tale of Byngsoo Son, who rented a car in San Francisco, took a 12-day road trip with his family (Grand Canyon, Vegas, etc), and got a bill for over $3,400. Why? He crossed state lines, which he didn’t realize triggered a $1-a-mile clause in his contract. How did the car company know? Payless (oh, the irony!) had a GPS unit and “telematics” installed in the car, and was tracking its movements. In other words, they could search for the car at any point in its journey, so they knew when it triggered the Make-A-Shitload-of-Money clause. Did they call the hapless Son, and let him know that he might consider buying a used BMW instead? Of course not! Ah, the power of search….

Had a day of talking to folks about the book, including lunch with Marc (I’ve been meaning to talk to him about the book for months, as Netscape pretty much fired the search-driven starting gun, and Marc generally has a lot of really interesting things to say). I then went over to Friendster’s new offices for a good chat with Jonathan Abrams and a few of his colleagues. Good crew, a lot of level-headed enthusiasm (interesting concept, eh?) evident there. Then I spent some time on the phone with the CEO of Dipsea (remember them? I pinged them back here). Then my site went down. All in all a busy afternoon.

Marc had great stories to tell about the early days of Netscape, and lessons to be drawn from managing extraordinary growth. Folks forget that they sold Netscape – a company with something on the order of $600-800 million in revenues – for $10 billion to AOL. Marc drew an interesting set of graphs showing how browser revenue imploded when MSFT came in, but how portal revenue – OEM’ing traffic, essentially – grew to nearly the same size, about $200 million. We also spent some time on the future of search as it relates to media models. Good stuff.

Jonathan was busy hiring folks when I stopped in, as were many others I met at Friendster. A good sign, overall, for the Valley, that smaller and younger companies are hiring, as well as folks like Google. F’ster had none of the bling bling associated with fresh VC money adorning the office, which was refreshing. All I can say about our conversation (remember, I have to keep some stuff for the book) is that they are quite serious about expanding the offerings there, and it ain’t just dating…

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If you’ve ever driven down I-880 coming from points North toward San Jose, noticed the line of homes etched into the Eastern hills above Fremont, and wondered – “Who lives up there?” – the answer is Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen is a reknown user interface expert who’s written numerous books and articles on web design, and who was an early Google advisory board member. I drove up to see him yesterday on my way down to the Google holiday party (well, the Google holiday party for members of the press, anyway). Jakob’s house affords a sweeping view of the bay area from a more southern perspective, which is a bit disconcerting for someone who is used to seeing the bay from Mt. Tam or UC Berkeley.
Jakob has plenty to say about the state of search and design on the web. When I asked what was next in search, he said “Solving your problem, as opposed to finding you the best site.” An interesting insight. He believes search is a critical thinking skill that should be taught in the elementary school system, and I agree. It’s amazing how much smarter you can be online if you know a few basic search skills – use of quotes, and/or operators, a few basic syntax elements.
After Jakob I drove across the Valley to Google’s new building, this time for a holiday media mixer. Just about everyone who’s ever covered Google was there, from Dan Gillmor (SJMerc) to Fred Vogelstein (Fortune) to Kara Swisher (WSJ) to Stephanie Olsen (Cnet). And senior Google folks turned out in force, though some were obviously uncomfortable with being in a room teeming with journalists. I saw about ten folks I have interviewed for the book, it was good to reconnect. All in all a nice affair, and I had some interesting conversations with Craig Silverstein (employee #1), Krishna Bharat (created Google News and is now going to India to help start that project), Shona Brown (new at Google, running biz operations, wrote a good book back in the early bubble that may as well be a blueprint for Google right now), and many others. Larry, Sergey and Eric were there as well, they were predictably mobbed. I said hello and moved on. I hear Cory was in the house, though I didn’t see him, but Joi Ito was there, looking younger than when I first met him at Wired in 1993. How the hell did he do that?

I spent most of yesterday working on the book, talking to folks at Yahoo, Google, and with Paul Saffo. I met with Terry Winnograd, who was Larry Page’s professor at Stanford, worked with Larry and Sergey early in the project, and is still on Google’s technical advisory board (scroll down). While I was there I ran into Yossi Vardi, who is always a joy to see. The man is always beaming, and this was no exception, he was touring Google’s new building with Sergey and telling enthusiastic stories about Sergey’s recent trip to Israel (Yossi of course played host). In any case, internationalization is clearly a theme at Google. The company recently announced a new R&D center in India. I asked David Krane (Director of CC) why, and he said he company can’t expect everyone to come here, and there’s a lot of talent in Bangalore. Makes sense.

Terry is an energetic man, he was a founding member of CPSR and has done a lot of work on natural language and HCI (human computer interface). He recently took a sebbatical from Stanford to work at Google full time, and is now moving back into the academic life. I won’t go into all we discussed (gotta save something for the book!) but it was a good meeting, and I heard some funny tales of the early days, among other things.

At Yahoo I met with Srinija Srinivasan, Yahoo’s Editor in Chief. She’s been there almost since the beginning, and we had a robust and lengthy conversation about the role of editorial in search, the role of the directory at Yahoo (very interesting) and challenges ahead for the industry and the company. I really enjoyed Ninj, as she is known. She’s only 32, but has spent nearly 9 years thinking about this stuff as EIC at Yahoo. Prior to that, she worked on Doug Lenat’s CYC project, which for those of you unfamiliar with it was a very brave, arguably foolish, and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to solve AI’s “brittleness” problem. CYCorp still exists, applying some of its early work to corporate data issues.

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