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# System prepended metadata

title: How Google Works
tags: [thread]

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# How Google Works

###### tags: `thread`

Reading Eric Schmidt's (former CEO of Google) book How Google Works, there is a very detailed description of the high efficiency and creativity of early Google.

One afternoon in May 2002, Larry Page (founder of Google) was wandering around Google.com and he typed in Kawasaki H1B, but the search results came up with many ads to help immigrants apply for H-1B US visas, nothing about Kawasaki motorcycles. For every search request Larry entered after that, the page returned was full of unrelated advertising content.

Larry was shocked at the useless information Google was searching for, and after that, magically, Larry didn't call anyone for accountability or have a meeting to discuss solutions. He just printed out the search results he didn't like, flagged the irrelevant ad content, and posted them on a bulletin board next to the pool table.

Larry then wrote "these ads suck" on a piece of paper and went home without any phone calls or meetings.

The next week, early Monday morning, an engineer (Jeff Dean) completely unrelated to the ad search business wrote an email detailing the cause of the problem and providing a solution.

Jeff Dean saw Larry's message and spent the weekend with his team working on a new solution and a new model, with additional back-testing results to demonstrate the advantages of the new system compared to the common systems available at the time.

The new model studied by this engineer determined that "the ranking of advertisements is judged by relevance, not the cost paid by advertisers", and it also made Google stand out from the search engines at the time. This engineer is currently expanding Google's AI business.