NI-Limits Blog

After the NI-Limits executive team narrowly escaped the tragedy in Phuket this weekend, we returned to Kuala Lumpur with countless stories to re-tell and important news to share. Our list of must write article is longer than ever, and the only thing that got us through the cold nights at the closed airport was David Vise’s Google Story.

Determined to provide some interesting information about Google to our readers, it was Mashable who gave us the head-start we needed by announcing that it was Google’s 10th Birthday, or at least, it had been ten years since the infamous googol (a one with a hundred zeros after it) typo took place and landed Larry and Sergey with the Google phenomenon!

Back on September 15th, 1997, who would have thought a new search engine started by two 24-year old Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, would not only become a global powerhouse, but also a verb?

However you slice it, Google is the victor in the search engine war, and shows no signs of slowing down.

While some are saying that September 15th, 2007 (tomorrow) is the search engine’s 10th birthday, it is actually just the anniversary of the domain name purchase. The company was incorporated on September 7th, 1998, and that will be used as the official anniversary. The company is said to have numerous retrospectives planned for 2008, leading up to the date.

Having met in the spring of 1995 , Larry and Sergey became joined at the hip. Processing up-to 100,000 searches a day from their college campus computers as part of their final thesis, they eventually got enough funding to create their first rack of independent computers, at which stage they were building them in sets of twenty. They could prove to the world that their search technology was superior to everything else on the planet, but no one believed it was at all important, so both Yahoo, and Microsoft turned-up their noses at the opportunity to buy or license the technology, forcing Larry and Sergey to wait for outside funding.

Regular attendants of the burning-man, employees at the googleplex benefited in more ways than one:

From 20% innovation time, where employees were encouraged to work on their own projects and lower any potential for staff to start freelancing or moonlighting, through to extensive stock options and free healthy food, it did not take long for these incentives to mark their path.

Google search was soon serving over one million searches a day and was being translated into over 100 languages, including Klingon!

Other companies followed suite, with 3M introducing 15% time, a milestone for the company that resulted in the introduction of the post-it-note.

Having never spent a single cent on advertising, other than in a recent super bowel pitch that was more to say "It’s confirmed, we rule the universe," and a few mouse mats and t-shirts they gave out to college campuses, yet they now own the most lucrative advertising network to ever exist, capable of earning them more than a million dollars a day!

Having purchase stratosphere aviation companies and being rumoured to invest or out-rightly buy their own space satellite’s, it is obvious that Google are here to stay and will quickly become the most power privately owned corporation in the universe. A fact that is only emphasized by their recent launch of Google Moon, another cherry on the top of an already over-spilling pie with plenty of cream.

We thought we were breaking precedent by offering US$ 250 as the grand prize to our mascot design competition, but Google have just announced that they will be giving away US$ 30 Million (RM 1,000,000,000) as their prize for the Lunar X-Prize contest:

All they have to do is land a privately funded spacecraft on the moon. Of course, it costs NASA a whole lot more than $30 million to send the shuttle into space and back without even stopping at the moon. So the odds of anyone designing and flying a ship to the moon for less money than $30 million is pretty slim.

But then, if they can afford to kit -out their offices with bathrooms that have extravagant touch-pad controlled toilets with six different levels of heat for the seat, and automated washing and drying, or provide free lunch including sweet potato jalapeño bisque with corn with tortellini primavera salad and grilled New York strip steaks seasoned with creole spices and served with crescent city steak sauce and crispy organic onion rings, thirty million hardly does much for you any longer…

Nonetheless, if you are still hoping to look for work there, perhaps you should take a quick sneak peak at a couple of random questions from their incredibly complex and taxing aptitude test, which is the first stage of a ten stage process involved for any new hires at Google:

• Solve this cryptic equation, realising of course that values for M and E could be interchanged. No leading zeros are allowed:
  WWWDOT - GOOGLE = DOTCOM …?
• Write a haiku describing possible methods for predicting search traffic seasonally …?
• On an infinite two-dimensional rectangular lattice of 1-ohm resistors, what is the resistance between two nodes that are a knight’s move away …?

For the full 21 questions, you need to read David’s book, or Search Google!

But would that not interfere with the new privacy laws that the company wants to introduce…?

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