'Browse' used to mean this

Corporate schwag -- T-shirts, mugs, mousepads -- has long been a way of saying "We appreciate you" or "Please don't forget us." We're not immune from making stuff with our name on it, of course. But we do try to pick things to sell that are fun, sturdy, and usable.

We're telling you this because Google Store has had a makeover. We're not telling you to go there. But if you do, you'll have a better shopping experience (as they say) than previously, especially if you live outside the U.S. We're even open all night.

Dylan Casey
Google Store manager

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Greets from GoogleGuy!

Some other Googlers have stopped by to introduce themselves, so it seems appropriate to say hello. Many Google Blog readers may not have heard the story of how GoogleGuy got started, so forgive this bit of historical rambling.

I'm a Google engineer. About three years ago, I was waiting for a program to finish compiling, and I was reading what people online were saying about Google. I remember seeing a question from a site owner about how to structure his site for better crawling, and thinking it would be great if a Googler could just pop by to answer technical questions like that. And then I thought, I'm a Google engineer. I can answer technical questions like that. So I did. Since then, I've managed to post around 2,000 messages in various web forums, setting the record straight whenever possible.

Of course, I had to have an online nickname. What if I got sick, or needed to take a break? I needed a handle that someone else could step into if necessary. After not a lot of consideration, GoogleGuy seemed just right. My primary inspiration was the Man in Black in The Princess Bride. When he returned to Buttercup, he could just hand the reins to a new Man in Black. It didn't bother him that no one knew his true identity:

Fezzik: Why do you wear a mask? Were you burned by acid, or something like that?
Man In Black: Oh no, it's just they're terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.

So there you have it. Lately, I've been pretty quiet, but at some point I'll hit the Google blog again to hold forth on, say, which is better in a url: hyphen or underscore.

Later -- but hopefully, soon,

GoogleGuy

P.S. Usually, it's a hyphen.

P.P.S. If anyone knows of a good source of iocaine powder, lemme know. I've spent the last few years building up an immunity to it just in case. But you know how it is: hard to find these days.

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Global worming

Okay, folks, we know what you're thinking.

So Google got hacked, huh?
Actually, we didn't. What happened yesterday was that someone sent the latest version of the MyDoom computer virus out for a spin, and this version flooded search engines like ours with automated searches. Fortunately, we were able to quickly identify those queries and block them, so that, for most of our users, at no point was our site significantly impaired.

Then why did some people get error messages when they tried to do searches?
A very small percentage of our users and networks--most notably, a few media outlets that write about us--were heavily infected with MyDoom, so our systems temporarily blocked their queries. By noon, service for all our users had been completely restored.

What was up with that "Error-27" page?
Yeah, we've just learned that our error message for blocked queries isn't the friendliest or most informative communication we've ever had with our users. Hey, we didn't think we'd ever have to show it to anyone...

What's MyDoom again?
Here's a technical explanation of the MyDoom virus and how it works.

Great, but I'm not a geek, okay? I just want to know if I have this thing and how to get rid of it.
If you suspect your computer may have been infected with MyDoom, or just want to be sure that it isn't, we recommend that you do a search for "MyDoom" and/or "antivirus software." Plenty of reputable sites can help you check your hard drive for MyDoom and other viruses, remove whatever viruses you find, and protect your computer from getting infected in the future. If you already have a virus scanner, be sure that it has the latest virus definition file (many programs update automatically) and scan your machine again just to be sure. We'll all probably be living with viruses for a long time; let's make sure we're well-armed.

-- Urs Hoelzle
VP of operations and Google Fellow

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Racking up an honor

We're five years old and already they're sticking us in a museum. The Computer History Museum, to be precise, a neighbor of ours here in Mountain View that boasts the world's largest collection of artifacts from the still-young digital era. Yesterday a bunch of Googlers toured a small portion of the collection, gawking at a Victorian Era difference engine and a German Enigma code machine, chuckling over immense IBM and Cray warhorses, lusting for TRS80s and Apple IIs, and so on.



Admittedly, we were also there for a parochial purpose: to celebrate the entry into the museum's permanent collection of the first Google corkboard server rack, a do-it-yourself contraption which was one of about 30 in our fledgling company's first data center back in prehistoric, mist-enshrouded 1999. A few specs: each tray contained eight 22GB hard drives and one power supply, and the rack itself required no fewer than 86 hand-installed cooling fans. Guess the economy wasn't the only thing overheated in 1999.

-- Michael Krantz
Google Blog team

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Warning: we brake for number theory

If any Silicon Valley drivers have found that traffic is moving more slowly than usual these days on the southbound 101 right around Ralston, you may have us to blame. Last week we unveiled a billboard that's a bit unusual in that it promotes Google only to one very narrow constituency: engineers who are geeky enough to be annoyed at the very existence of a math problem they haven't solved, and smart enough to rectify the situation.



In other words, the billboard (which offers problem-solvers the URL to, sorry, a page containing an even harder problem), is a recruiting campaign. We've always worked hard to hire the smartest engineers we can find, and we thought this would be a cool way to find a few more. Perhaps including you. If you're a math or computer whiz who doesn't happen to live within shouting distance of Palo Alto -- good luck, and we're looking forward to hearing from you.

- A. Googler

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Not quite a walk in the park

The great Steve Prefontaine used to say that running is about "having guts." Last Wednesday, on a hot, humid day in Central Park, about 40 of us New York Googlers showed our share, joining almost 18,000 other hardy souls in the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge, an annual 3.5-mile race which raises money for the Central Park Conservancy and New York Road Runners programs.



Central Park races are always tough, and the Corporate Challenge is worse than most, because both the start and the finish require running uphill. But for me, the third mile was the worst. The air quality on the East Side was, um, not good, and the stretch behind the Metropolitan Museum seemed harder than usual -- the ground is flat, but there was no air; it was like breathing in a plastic bag. Fortunately, then came the Cat Hill down to the Boat House, and the finish line was in sight.

Afterward, we reunited at our stand to exchange race gossip, cheer our strong showing (yours truly finished among the top 10 women), and most of all, congratulate each other for surviving the humidity and the hills.

And speaking of hills: the Corporate Challenge hits San Francisco in September. All you Mountain View Googlers - time to start stretching.

-- Corinna Cortes
research scientist
Google New York

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A man, a plan, a pointless (?) program

As the Google engineering department's director of search quality, I (along with my team) am responsible for maintaining the ranking technology that decides what order your results show up in when you do a Google search. It's an important job and an exciting one. I can't tell you all the secrets of what my group does, but I can tell you a non-Google story that will give you a taste of what it's like to work with large amounts of text data and computing resources.



On the last palindromic date, 20:02 02/20 2002, I was, like any good computer geek, reminded of the palindrome that appears on page 170 of the computer manual Common Lisp, the Language (2nd ed):

A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal -- Panama!

A quick search reminded me that the record for such a palindrome, established in 1984 by Dan Hoey, was only 543 words. I immediately thought I could (and therefore should) write a program to beat that. I wrote an algorithm that searches a dictionary and figured out how to put the words together in a sentence that starts with "A man, a plan" and ends with "a canal, Panama." It took me until 1:00 a.m. that night of 02/20 (and some minor bug-bashing the next day) to produce this result -- to my knowledge, still the longest palindromic sentence ever created.

So what, you may ask? Good question. I readily admit that my accomplishment has no practical social purpose or business application. But as a story that spans 18 years from Hoey's palindrome to mine, it has a moral about how it is becoming easier to do big things. Hoey is an excellent computer scientist, but he said he spent days writing a disk-based B-tree package for his program. I was saved all this, because a dictionary now fits in main memory and I could use straightforward binary search. Thank you, Moore's Law.

Also, I was saved from having to fiddle with the dictionary because of the public domain Moby Dictionary. Thank you, Internet (and Grady Ward). The advances over the years let me combine a 100,000-word dictionary and a year-old laptop to break an 18-year old record. If you're a programmer, you could do it too: beat my record, or invent something new -- for example, can you invent a double-entendre law firm that is longer than Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe? With the resources available to you, you can accomplish a lot. Let me know what you come up with.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to work -- I have some ideas that can only be tackled with a few terabytes of text and a few thousand computers.

-- Peter Norvig
director of search quality

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