Dear Google Friends!
Welcome to Vol. I Issue 1 of the Google Friends newsletter, news about
the engine behind the search. Thank you for using Google!
Introduction
Welcome to the first in a long line of Google Friends installments!
It's taken a while, but we've been using the time to make Google even
better. With new features, glowing press, and tremendous
word-of-mouth, Google has been growing by leaps and bounds.
We plan to make this newsletter a monthly, so don't worry about us
flooding your mailbox. If you're worried anyway, see the end of this
letter if you want to remove yourself from the mailing list.
Google graduates
Many of you have been with us while we were still at Stanford. As
you've probably noticed, Google the research project has become
Google.com. We want to bring higher quality and greatly improved
search to the world, and a company seems to be the best vehicle for
accomplishing that goal. There is a great deal that can be done to
improve searching on the web, and Google.com will spend a majority of
its effort developing new technologies to make your life easier.
Google.com was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, both
Ph.D. students in Computer Science at Stanford University. Google
received seed funding from a number of angel investors, including Andy
Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun. Google recently moved from
its first "world headquarters" (a house with a hot tub in Menlo Park),
to the new "Google-Plex," a prime office on University Ave. in
downtown Palo Alto.
Google gets great press
In the February 22, 1999 issue of Newsweek, Steven Levy touts Google
as "the Net's hottest new search engine, [which] draws on feedback
from the Web itself to deliver more relevant answers to customer
queries." In the December 1998 PC Magazine review of Google, Breck
White says, "Yahoo! and newcomer Google! were the only sites in our
roundup to return highly relevant hits consistently, even on searches
for very general or common terms such as Internet standards."
We've also had great mentions in recent issues of the Washington Post,
the Seattle Times, TechWeb, Release 1.0, Voir, Le Monde, Konrad, Salon
Magazine, and many others. Check out our always-changing press page
at http://google.com/press.html for updates and links to the stories.
Also, if you see us in the press, email mentions@g... so we can
add it to our press page.
Google gets a facelift
Many of you may have noticed that we've updated our website. We
decided it was time to do a little Pre-Spring cleaning and give the
site a face lift. Now the front page is cleaner and less cluttered,
in line with our philosophy that as little as possible should get in
the way of letting you search.
You'll also notice we've changed the logo. We think we've entered the
beta stages of our search engine, and thought that others should know.
We can't wait until we make an official release!
Growing pains
Our capacity is going up (thanks to all you users!), and we've been
expanding to meet the demand. We've been hiring more staff and
putting up more servers to scale the system (we've started ordering
our computers in 21-packs). We've also begin crawling more often, so
our results not only remain fast, they also remain up to date.
In fact, we are crawling right now, and expect to crawl continuously
from now on. We'll give you a notice when the newly crawled websites
are up.
New search operators
We've been adding features along with our capacity. We've introduced
phrase search and the boolean NOT operator. Yes, we've received all
your emails requesting these features and now are happy to provide
them. If you don't know what these features do, we'll do a little
explanation.
Phrase search allows you to search for a specific phrase. For
example, if you enter [ Bill Clinton ] into the search box, you will
get pages with the terms "Bill" and "Clinton" in them, with no
guarantees that the terms will appear next to each other (though pages
with them close together are more likely to appear near the top of the
search results). However, if you enter [ "Bill Clinton" ] (with
quotes) you will only get pages with that exact phrase.
The boolean NOT operator is for those searches that you want to
restrict. Suppose you enter [ serial killers ] into the search box,
and get some unwanted results. You can "NOT" them out by using the
minus character. Just add a "-" in front of terms that you don't want
to appear. You would just enter [ serial killers -corn -flakes ] and
that would remove unwanted search results.
Want a job?
Looking for a start-up adventure? Google is the leading designer of
the next generation search engine. We are rapidly hiring talented
people to bring the latest and greatest technology to the web.
Reasons to work for Google:
1. Hot technology
2. Cool technology
3. Intelligent, fun, talented, hardworking, high-energy teammates
4. Location, location, location! University Ave in downtown Palo Alto,
the urban center of Silicon Valley
5. Excellent benefits
6. Stock options
7. Casual dress atmosphere
8. Free snacks and drinks
9. An exciting place to work! Your ideas can make a difference
10. Millions of people will use and appreciate your software
We have lots of openings. Check out our jobs page at
http://www.google.com/jobs.html!
Suggestions/Comments
Want to tell us something? Send your comments to comments@g...
We love hearing from users.
