Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
Speaker 1: tech Stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hello everyone,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech stuff. My name is Chris Poelette,
Speaker 1: and I am the tech editor here at how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. Sending across from me, as he always does,
Speaker 1: is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Hey there, and today we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about a very large company that, believe
Speaker 1: it or not, started with a BackRub. Yes it did.
Speaker 1: But before we get too far into that, let's start
Speaker 1: with a little listener mail. This listener mail comes from
Speaker 1: Alex from le Lexington, South Carolina, and Alex says, Hi, there, guys,
Speaker 1: I'm a huge fan of the podcast What a Cliche?
Speaker 1: And I was wondering if you could do a podcast
Speaker 1: on Google. I'm an avid user of Google search Engine
Speaker 1: and Gmail, but I was wondering about the company, it's
Speaker 1: history and other products like Android p s. Could you
Speaker 1: work in a way to say listener mail the way
Speaker 1: you used to, Alex? I was going to do that,
Speaker 1: but every time I do listener mail the old way,
Speaker 1: we get a bunch of really negative reviews on iTunes
Speaker 1: and uh and and my ego just can't take it anymore.
Speaker 1: So if you really want to hear the old listener mail,
Speaker 1: I suggest listening to an old episode. I know that's lame,
Speaker 1: but I just don't. I'm tired of it. I don't.
Speaker 1: I can't take it anymore that the two factions are
Speaker 1: battling it out of or whether or not to bring
Speaker 1: back that. Eventually one side will win definitively, and then
Speaker 1: we will have the listener male sound effect established from
Speaker 1: there on out. Alright, But in the meantime, let's move
Speaker 1: on to Alex's topic, which is Google. Yeah, we would
Speaker 1: we would probably have to do six or seven podcasts
Speaker 1: to even get close to covering the entirety of Google.
Speaker 1: So we really wanted to focus on Google the company. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we might talk a little bit about the search
Speaker 1: engine specifically, and then you know, well we'll mention a
Speaker 1: few other things along the way, I'm sure, but let's
Speaker 1: let's first start with the company that was founded back
Speaker 1: in nine Now that's even then, that's not going all
Speaker 1: the way back to the very beginning of Google. If
Speaker 1: you want to do that, you have to go into
Speaker 1: the time travel machine, you know, I said, we weren't
Speaker 1: going to do sound effects. But you know what, Here
Speaker 1: we go into the time travel machine criss car all right,
Speaker 1: and we're just gonna set this back to the seatbelts broken,
Speaker 1: just hold on, okay, all right? So yea fresh out
Speaker 1: of college here I go. Um. So here we are
Speaker 1: at Stanford, Yes, and we're seeing the meeting for the
Speaker 1: first time between Larry Page and Sergey Brenn. Actually, you
Speaker 1: might expect the clouds to part and the heavenly multitude
Speaker 1: to start singing. In reality, it's because Larry Page is
Speaker 1: visiting the campus as a prospective student and Serge has
Speaker 1: been asked to show him around. And not only that,
Speaker 1: as you might be able to hear in the background,
Speaker 1: the two don't really get along so well. Actually, we
Speaker 1: weren't there at the first time that this happened. We're
Speaker 1: only witnessing it now as a result of having our
Speaker 1: own time machine. But Google is actually remarkably forthcoming about
Speaker 1: about some of this early information. Yeah, apparently the two
Speaker 1: had some disagreements on pretty much absolutely everything they talked about. However,
Speaker 1: let's let's jump back over here. Let's quick just do
Speaker 1: a jump ahead by a year, all right, so so
Speaker 1: now it's a year later and Larry and Serge are
Speaker 1: both at Stanford as as grad students, and now they're
Speaker 1: working on a project together. And Chris alluded to this
Speaker 1: earlier in the episode. Yes, um, although it uh, it's
Speaker 1: kind of funny to imagine an actual company, especially one
Speaker 1: in the size of Google, being called this. The original
Speaker 1: version of the search engine was actually called back Rub
Speaker 1: and it was located on the Stanford servers, which was
Speaker 1: fine for a while until people actually started using it
Speaker 1: and the traffic became too much for Stanford, which said
Speaker 1: get out. Yeah, no, grant, this is back in nineties six.
Speaker 1: Bandwidth back then was different from them what it is today.
Speaker 1: But yes, it was using up too much of the bandwidth.
Speaker 1: So Sarah, Gay and h and Larry, I just call
Speaker 1: him that we're buds. You've been to one Google io event,
Speaker 1: and here I am calling the founders by the first name. Uh.
Speaker 1: They have no idea who I am. They're kind of
Speaker 1: informal guys. Yeah, I hear that they're very nice. I've
Speaker 1: never met either of them, but at any rate, they
Speaker 1: decided that they're onto something here. And so the next year,
Speaker 1: in fact, hey, let's let's go back to to modern
Speaker 1: day and just talk about this in the past. It's
Speaker 1: come too much jumping otherwise, I'm okay with all right,
Speaker 1: let's let's we're gonna just pop right onto m much better. Okay.
Speaker 1: So a year after they first started the BackRub project,
Speaker 1: they decided that they wanted to try and make this
Speaker 1: an actual business. And that's when they said, okay, well,
Speaker 1: you know what, we probably need a different name, and
Speaker 1: they started to kind of pitch around different ideas for names.
Speaker 1: They eventually came up with a play on a word
Speaker 1: called that's Google, but Google spelled g o O g
Speaker 1: O L. And what is a Google? It is a
Speaker 1: one followed by a hundred zeros. That is a very
Speaker 1: large number. It's it's ginormous, as they say, and it
Speaker 1: actually alludes to their goal of trying to um organize
Speaker 1: and identify all the information on the Internet, which was
Speaker 1: a whole lot of it. Yeah, that this this brings
Speaker 1: us to the company's mission, and the mission has not
Speaker 1: changed since at first was founded, and the mission is
Speaker 1: to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible
Speaker 1: and useful. Now you may have also heard that Google
Speaker 1: has an informal motto, which is don't be evil. Yes motto,
Speaker 1: especially when you're talking about a company that is getting
Speaker 1: as large and pervasive as Google, you're gonna hope that
Speaker 1: they're not going to be evil. Um if they are evil,
Speaker 1: they become Skynet. So uh so Google the whole idea
Speaker 1: behind don't be evil falls into into two different realms. Really.
Speaker 1: One is that they want to provide people with accessible
Speaker 1: information and accurate information that is completely objective. So, in
Speaker 1: other words, they want to give people search results based
Speaker 1: upon what people want to find. They don't want to,
Speaker 1: you know, give preferential treatment to one company over another
Speaker 1: because of some sort of relationship they have with that company.
Speaker 1: They want to be as objective as possible. That's that's
Speaker 1: rule number one one. The second part of it is
Speaker 1: they must operate within the law. So if whatever they
Speaker 1: want to do would be against the law, that goes
Speaker 1: against their motto, their informal motto of don't be evil. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is actually actually became a very interesting subject recently
Speaker 1: when Google began to talk about the possibility of getting
Speaker 1: out of China. Now, Google got into China back in
Speaker 1: two thousand and six, and even when they were first
Speaker 1: going into China. UH executives were saying that it was
Speaker 1: going to be an uneasy situation because in China, it's
Speaker 1: impossible for Google to follow both of those rules UH
Speaker 1: to the letter to to not be evil, because in China,
Speaker 1: the Chinese government is very specific about companies have to
Speaker 1: be able to censor search results information that's coming into
Speaker 1: the country. The government has a very strict view on
Speaker 1: what can and cannot be allowed in right, and a
Speaker 1: lot of governments do this. China is not alone in this,
Speaker 1: but China in particular has a pretty big net. Yes.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're known for having the Great Firewall of China,
Speaker 1: which blocks lots and lots of information from getting into
Speaker 1: the country. So in China, it's it was essentially impossible
Speaker 1: to both follow the law and give people free access
Speaker 1: to objective information. So for for nearly four years, Google
Speaker 1: kind of struggled with this, and now it looks like
Speaker 1: they may actually get out of that country due to
Speaker 1: some other events which I guess we don't have to
Speaker 1: really go into that. Actually, they actually didn't enter China
Speaker 1: until fairly late because you know, as we were talking
Speaker 1: about it just a moment ago, you know, they were
Speaker 1: really launching as a large commercial entity or on the
Speaker 1: entity that would become the large commercial entity in UM.
Speaker 1: But you know, they didn't actually get into China until
Speaker 1: January of two thous and six, so that was actually
Speaker 1: sort of a late They were late to the market,
Speaker 1: and they didn't make up a very large percentage of
Speaker 1: the search market in China, unlike the rest of the world.
Speaker 1: Now globally, Google makes up around sixty percent of the
Speaker 1: search traffic, but in China it was much lower. UM
Speaker 1: So some people have taken that opportunity to say that
Speaker 1: China that Google really got out of China because it
Speaker 1: wasn't a particularly profitable business and it was a lot
Speaker 1: of bad PR so it made a good PR move
Speaker 1: to get out of China. I'm not quite that cynical.
Speaker 1: I don't necessarily think that that was what was going
Speaker 1: through their the executive's minds when they finally said, you
Speaker 1: know what, it's time for us to make a stand
Speaker 1: on this. But I don't know for sure. I could
Speaker 1: be I could be putting on the rose colored glasses
Speaker 1: in this case. But let's uh, I guess we should
Speaker 1: dial back the time just a little bit, kind of
Speaker 1: go through some of the other stuff that happened. Like
Speaker 1: you mentioned, they became a company in So this is
Speaker 1: where all you people who who like to either play
Speaker 1: a trivia or or run trivia games need to start
Speaker 1: writing this stuff down, because we're gonna give you lots
Speaker 1: and lots of little trivia bits yep yep. Now. Um, actually,
Speaker 1: Google was sort of a darling of the industry very
Speaker 1: early on because in December, that's when PC magazine basically said, hey,
Speaker 1: these guys are really onto something big and um they
Speaker 1: actually named it as one of the top hundred websites
Speaker 1: of um. And for a company that new on the
Speaker 1: scene to take on somebody as large as Yahoo, I mean,
Speaker 1: Yahoo was the portal. They were the destination for people
Speaker 1: who wanted to find stuff on the Internet at that point,
Speaker 1: and um, you know, for somebody to come in out
Speaker 1: of the blue and uh and take over and have
Speaker 1: them say, you know, hey, these guys have search down
Speaker 1: pat If you want to find something, use Google. And
Speaker 1: that's really remarkable, especially considering the fact that, I mean
Speaker 1: even before Google became an actual entity, they got a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars in funding. So you're about an upstart
Speaker 1: company that, by the way, was housed in a garage.
Speaker 1: I mean that we've seen this before. There are other
Speaker 1: big companies that got their starting garages. I can think
Speaker 1: of two off the top of my head, Microsoft and Apple.
Speaker 1: There you go another one. So you look at these
Speaker 1: major companies, they started off in people's garages. Google is
Speaker 1: no different. In fact this this would be surprising to me,
Speaker 1: just because by I would have thought you've gotten past
Speaker 1: the point where anyone could create an upstart company that
Speaker 1: could become a world power. But Google did it. Um,
Speaker 1: or rather Larry and Sage managed to do it, and
Speaker 1: uh so they incorporate. Um, it's not until two thousand
Speaker 1: four that they go public, and once they go public,
Speaker 1: they start, Uh there's I think they're training around eighty
Speaker 1: five dollars of shares and the I p O went
Speaker 1: live then and uh um, if you should actually look
Speaker 1: it up if you're curious to see exactly how much
Speaker 1: money they intended to raise with their I p O,
Speaker 1: because it's a very funny number. If my memory serves
Speaker 1: me correctly, I didn't think about until just now, so
Speaker 1: I didn't look at back up. But if I'm not mistaken,
Speaker 1: they were looking to raise e you know, the mathematical
Speaker 1: constant e. That's how much money they were attempting to raise.
Speaker 1: I just looked at the I just looked up the
Speaker 1: the number number that went uh, the actual number of shares,
Speaker 1: and the amount per share that went h live on
Speaker 1: August eighteenth, and that was eighty five dollars per share.
Speaker 1: So I was right. I can't believe I actually remembered correctly.
Speaker 1: And they and they opened with nineteen million, six hundred
Speaker 1: five thousand, fifty two shares of Class A common stock.
Speaker 1: That's quite a few. That's a lot. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: gone up since then. Yeah. Actually this morning, the morning
Speaker 1: that we are recording this podcast, it will be totally
Speaker 1: different by the time you guys hear it. Just bear
Speaker 1: that in mind. But this morning, when I looked it up,
Speaker 1: it was trading at five fifty nine dollars and twenty
Speaker 1: cents per share. Yeah, that's a pretty big jump from
Speaker 1: eighty five bucks. Yes, and I'm not sure if there
Speaker 1: have been any splits one way or the other since then.
Speaker 1: So the company employees twenty nearly twenty thousand employees um
Speaker 1: and the revenue for the lab for the third quarter
Speaker 1: of two thousand nine nearly six billion, dollars in revenue
Speaker 1: just for three months. That's not a year. That's three months,
Speaker 1: six billion dollars. Now, the profit profit is what you
Speaker 1: get when you take your revenue, you take your costs,
Speaker 1: you subtract the costs from the revenue. Profit was only tiny,
Speaker 1: little three points seven billion, So you know, come on Google, seriously,
Speaker 1: I'd settle for one billion of that, you know I would.
Speaker 1: I would also settle for a billion. Um. Well, there's
Speaker 1: there's so much to Google. So um, let's let's touch
Speaker 1: on the search because that's the bread and butter of
Speaker 1: how Google got started. Sounds good. Um, Google does use
Speaker 1: spiders and crawlers to look for information on the interner it. Um,
Speaker 1: they're very polite in the don't be evil sense, and
Speaker 1: that you can. You can actually have a spiders file
Speaker 1: in your website and Google will if you tell them
Speaker 1: to stay away from it. I don't know why you
Speaker 1: would do that. Well, if you've got a site that's
Speaker 1: on the web, presumably you'd have it there so people
Speaker 1: can find it. But you could do it, Yes, you could.
Speaker 1: And there are companies that are talking about doing that. Uh.
Speaker 1: In this case, we're talking about think companies that are
Speaker 1: wanting to protect their their content from being displayed freely
Speaker 1: on Google before you they before they're given a chance
Speaker 1: of charging you to get a glimpse at it. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: a number of publishers are actually considering blocking themselves, um
Speaker 1: from Google's uh digital eyeballs so that they can be
Speaker 1: the first to tell you what it is that they
Speaker 1: have to say for a fee. And Google's response has
Speaker 1: essentially been good luck with that. But um, it's not
Speaker 1: really the search itself and cataloging the information that makes
Speaker 1: the difference for Google. It's actually the algorithm it uses
Speaker 1: to display results on the search engine results. Page rank
Speaker 1: situation is serups, UM, serups and s EO are going
Speaker 1: to be big things that we talk about here. So
Speaker 1: page rank is an interesting system, and it's a secret system.
Speaker 1: It's a The algorithm that Google uses is secret and
Speaker 1: they tweak it all the time. And there are a
Speaker 1: lot of different reasons to tweak it. One is just
Speaker 1: that Google wants to make sure that the company is
Speaker 1: providing the best search results possible whenever you're searching for
Speaker 1: any particular topic. Another is uh, the reason they tweak
Speaker 1: it is is to avoid people gaming the system, like
Speaker 1: they don't want people to say, oh, Google looks for this, this,
Speaker 1: and this, So as long as we build that into
Speaker 1: our site, we're gonna rank really well in Google. Now,
Speaker 1: why would you want to rank well in Google? Well,
Speaker 1: you want to show up on the first page of
Speaker 1: the search results. Because people don't generally click very deeply
Speaker 1: into search results. You don't want to a lot of
Speaker 1: people don't go to the eteenth and fifteenth and sixteenth pages.
Speaker 1: Most people don't go to the page to Most people
Speaker 1: look at the first the first few links that are
Speaker 1: on the first page, which is what you get if
Speaker 1: you click the I'm feeling lucky button. You go directly
Speaker 1: to the very first link that Google has, and I
Speaker 1: think the first non advertisement, because you can you can
Speaker 1: become an advertiser with Google and they will put your
Speaker 1: results as a sponsored result. This listed separately. It's under
Speaker 1: a different color, so you can clearly see that one
Speaker 1: of them is an advertisement, whereas one is just a
Speaker 1: link that's pulled up through page rank. But yeah, the
Speaker 1: first page rank result is the one that you can't
Speaker 1: when you click on I'm feeling lucky. So how do
Speaker 1: you rank well in Google? Well, the easy answer is
Speaker 1: that you create a really really good website. Yes, uh,
Speaker 1: and that sounds like a pat answer, But in general,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what Google is looking for. I mean, the
Speaker 1: the the things that Google looks at our incoming links
Speaker 1: to your site, are other sites linking to your site,
Speaker 1: because if they are, that's usually a sign of quality. Yeah. Um, back,
Speaker 1: sorry to interrupt. And in the early days of s
Speaker 1: c O or search engine optimization, UM, a lot of
Speaker 1: people would try to overload their the code and their
Speaker 1: websites with keywords, and sometimes they would put them. I
Speaker 1: remember trying to bookmark pages that had dozens and dozens
Speaker 1: of keywords in the actual page title because they were
Speaker 1: trying to load up. But um, Google doesn't necessarily pay
Speaker 1: attention to the number of keywords that you have in there,
Speaker 1: but it does look at where they are on the page,
Speaker 1: and who's linking to you and to whom you're linking,
Speaker 1: and how old the site is, all sorts of little
Speaker 1: bits and details that sort of tell you whether or
Speaker 1: not this page really is what it is, or if
Speaker 1: you're just trying to fool it by throwing in a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of keywords. And they look at the quality
Speaker 1: of the links that are coming in as well. So
Speaker 1: let's say that you have a website and you have
Speaker 1: a bunch of link farms. Link farms are these sites.
Speaker 1: You've probably seen them. It's a site where it's just
Speaker 1: a bunch of links to other sites. And the concept
Speaker 1: here is you're trying to game the system. You're trying
Speaker 1: to create all these different sites that are really just
Speaker 1: a bunch of links so that they count towards the
Speaker 1: link count and page ranks. Says oh, well, there are
Speaker 1: all these websites that are linking to this page. This
Speaker 1: page must be a good one, so I will rank
Speaker 1: it higher. That's really irritating. Google actually gets around that
Speaker 1: a little bit. So what they're looking for is they're
Speaker 1: looking for the quality of the websites that are linking
Speaker 1: to you. If you have a website that has a
Speaker 1: hundred incoming links pointing at your website, but they're all
Speaker 1: from these really tiny websites or even link farms, it's
Speaker 1: not going to do as well in page rank as
Speaker 1: a website that has five incoming links from really well
Speaker 1: established websites. So let's say that your website has links
Speaker 1: coming into it from um don't Well, we'll see how
Speaker 1: stuff works how Stuff Works is actually regarded as a
Speaker 1: very good website through Google UM as our websites like CNN, MSNBC, UM,
Speaker 1: like anything that's that's been around for a while. There's
Speaker 1: it's got a UH, an easily identifiable UH brand behind it.
Speaker 1: That usually counts for a lot. UM. The sites are established,
Speaker 1: they went on the net, people are linking to them,
Speaker 1: and so those those sites that do well in Google
Speaker 1: already UM are considered trusted sites too. So that links
Speaker 1: to you. Then that that's going to count more than
Speaker 1: Joe Bob who has his you know, Joe Bobb's world
Speaker 1: of the web. Until Joe Bob you know, is around
Speaker 1: and gets big and people know who he is and
Speaker 1: stuff right, and then Joe Bob's kicking butt exactly yeah,
Speaker 1: and it can happen. And again, a lot of the
Speaker 1: UH a lot of the people out there who are
Speaker 1: saying that they can help you your website rank betteran
Speaker 1: Google UH we call the Search engine optimization or se
Speaker 1: oh UM. There are little tricks you can do that
Speaker 1: can help a little bit, but the best thing you
Speaker 1: can do is provide the most compelling, interesting and user
Speaker 1: friendly web experience you can UH. Make sure that your
Speaker 1: data is relevant, make sure that that's presented in an
Speaker 1: attractive way. That uh not. It shouldn't just be attractive,
Speaker 1: it should also be user friendly in the sense that
Speaker 1: you want it to be able. You want people using
Speaker 1: different browsers to be able to see it. So if
Speaker 1: you create this really amazing website that has all these
Speaker 1: bells and whistles and special effects, but only the people
Speaker 1: who are running the very latest web browsers can see it,
Speaker 1: that's not gonna do so well for you when you're
Speaker 1: coming to Google page rank, because it's a lot of
Speaker 1: people just aren't even gonna link to you because they
Speaker 1: can't even see the stuff that's on your site. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and um, you know, if you do search engine optimization
Speaker 1: correctly anyway, you're you're sort of helping Google out because
Speaker 1: you can you can give them a brief a brief
Speaker 1: set of keywords and things that will help Google identify
Speaker 1: what the page is actually about. Um, if you try
Speaker 1: to overload it, it's it's going to register as noise
Speaker 1: to Google and will not help you. As a matter
Speaker 1: of fact, it could actually put you farther down the list.
Speaker 1: But we should talk about the hardware to because I
Speaker 1: mean in order to do this, to operate this search engine, UM,
Speaker 1: you know, there have to be lots and lots and
Speaker 1: lots of computers involved. Yeah, and they're actually using very
Speaker 1: average machines when you when you look at it from
Speaker 1: UH server technology and Google's philosophy is that it's a
Speaker 1: lot cheaper to replace a broken average machine than it
Speaker 1: would be to replace a broken state of the art machine.
Speaker 1: And if five average machines are the same cost collectively
Speaker 1: as one state of the art machine, and you're still
Speaker 1: getting an equivalent or even better amount of performance from
Speaker 1: those five machines collectively, then it makes more sense to
Speaker 1: go with that. So the data centers at Google are
Speaker 1: filled with these these UH fairly average servers UM. Now
Speaker 1: a lot of them are configured in a very special
Speaker 1: way that Google has has kind of come up with,
Speaker 1: and you can actually read all about this. There are
Speaker 1: UM articles on the web that that talk about the
Speaker 1: kind of configuration that Google uses UH. And they have
Speaker 1: a very special file management system that allows the search
Speaker 1: engine to reference information very very quickly, which is why
Speaker 1: you don't have a big delay when you do a search. UM.
Speaker 1: And they have lots of them, thousands and thousands of
Speaker 1: these computers, and they also make lots and lots of
Speaker 1: redundant backups, so if any of these machines fails, it's
Speaker 1: not going to really cost more than just a tiny blip.
Speaker 1: And so we should just say win these machines because
Speaker 1: they're all kinds of machines. That's exactly why Google has
Speaker 1: built redundancy into its system, because they know these machines
Speaker 1: are fallible. They will fall apart or stop working, or
Speaker 1: you know, there'll be some glitch that after a while
Speaker 1: well going unchecked, will shut down a server or perhaps
Speaker 1: even a full rack of servers. So yeah, there has
Speaker 1: to be redundancy. That's why Google has also looked at
Speaker 1: some really interesting potential solutions for for data centers. Because
Speaker 1: data there's take a lot of space, they take a
Speaker 1: lot of power, they generate tons of heat. So there
Speaker 1: have been a few interesting patents out there for potential
Speaker 1: solutions to this, including a giant floating data center. That's
Speaker 1: one of my favorites. Um. I'm not sure that we're
Speaker 1: ever going to see it, but it's a really cool idea.
Speaker 1: So um and they also take good care of their employees.
Speaker 1: They have very good benefits for their employees. They have
Speaker 1: their main headquarters in California. House you California, all kinds
Speaker 1: of nice amenities. It's called the Google Plex, and it's
Speaker 1: designed in a campus layout, so there are several buildings
Speaker 1: on the campus. You'll often see people on segways or
Speaker 1: bicycles going to and from the different buildings. UH. Most
Speaker 1: of their please work in an open environment. There are
Speaker 1: very few private offices on the Google Plex. Um. They
Speaker 1: all get a day to work on personal projects. Yeah,
Speaker 1: essentially of your time can be spent working on personal projects,
Speaker 1: and a lot of those have actually turned into other
Speaker 1: stuff that they've offered, like or cut. Yeah. If you
Speaker 1: go to Wave Google Labs, which is one of their
Speaker 1: that's where they have like some of the newest stuff
Speaker 1: that they're working on, and most of it is kind
Speaker 1: of in an experimental phase where it's not necessarily ready
Speaker 1: for UH to be rolled out as a as a
Speaker 1: full fledged feature. A lot of that comes from that time. Yep, yep.
Speaker 1: They've got game rooms, exercise rooms, they have an an
Speaker 1: infinity swimming pool lane thing. Um. They it's it's also
Speaker 1: amazing they've they've grown so much too over the past
Speaker 1: several years. Just the different services they've offered to acquisitions, uh,
Speaker 1: you know up and comers, people like Rightly and YouTube
Speaker 1: and Pyra Labs, which is the the company that created Blogger,
Speaker 1: all kinds of news services. Now they're getting into a
Speaker 1: video advertising and that's how they make their their money
Speaker 1: is through advertising. That's that that is if you're wondering
Speaker 1: how Google makes all that money, that revenue we talked
Speaker 1: about earlier, it's through ads. Google ads are huge, um,
Speaker 1: and they're really popular and they dominate the ad space
Speaker 1: in the search market. Yeah. That's Um, it's funny because
Speaker 1: you know, even Joe Bob when he gets his website going,
Speaker 1: you know, he's going to be able to sign up
Speaker 1: for an ad Sense account with Google and offer Google
Speaker 1: powered ads on his website and they will you send
Speaker 1: him a check every time it gets to a certain
Speaker 1: point and then pass that when he becomes a big
Speaker 1: star um for his amazing blog. I encourage you to
Speaker 1: check it out. Um. But you know this is basically
Speaker 1: it's Google sort of sharing the wealth. The more advertising
Speaker 1: you can send to them, they will cut you in
Speaker 1: on the deal. You know, so you know, once you're
Speaker 1: a registered member of the ad Sense. But um, it's
Speaker 1: it's because of Google's It all comes down to Google's
Speaker 1: results though, because um, because Google is such a useful tool,
Speaker 1: people want to advertise next to it because they know
Speaker 1: they're getting good results, and people are going to see
Speaker 1: those ads alongside those results and at that that coveted
Speaker 1: place at the top of the page for which they
Speaker 1: actually do an auction. And we could talk about tons
Speaker 1: of other Google products, but we're running out of time,
Speaker 1: But just to give you a kind of a quick rundown,
Speaker 1: you have things like the Chrome web browser, as well
Speaker 1: as the upcoming Chrome operating system, operating systems, Android operating
Speaker 1: system for mobile phones. Yep. You've got Google Voice, which
Speaker 1: is as kind of an interesting experiment. Sometimes it works
Speaker 1: for me and sometimes it doesn't. Um. You've got Gmail,
Speaker 1: which was private until Valentine's Day of I think two
Speaker 1: thousand seven, and then they opened it up to everybody. Um.
Speaker 1: You've got a Google Wave, which is still in the
Speaker 1: experimental phase. We were talking about that kind of thing earlier.
Speaker 1: Google Reader, Google Readers, UM, Google Books, where they're trying
Speaker 1: to digitize all the books in the in the world.
Speaker 1: So Google's serious about this organizizing all the world's information
Speaker 1: there's there's the Google Health for medical records. It goes
Speaker 1: on and on, and eventually Google is gonna know everything
Speaker 1: about us. And if you're ever confused about who you
Speaker 1: are or what your role is in the world, you
Speaker 1: probably could just Google yourself. That'll just remind you. But
Speaker 1: we could do a series of podcasts on all the
Speaker 1: different pieces of Google, and we have. We've done one
Speaker 1: Android and we've talked a bit about Google Docs before.
Speaker 1: So but yes, uh, it's a fascinating company. Um, and
Speaker 1: it I see it continuing. It's it's a question. Well,
Speaker 1: some of us say, look, organizing the world's information and
Speaker 1: others say world domination. The two very well made, go
Speaker 1: hand in hand together. Uh. So I hope you enjoyed that. Um, Alex,
Speaker 1: I hope that answered your question. If you have any
Speaker 1: other specific questions about Google, please write us all right
Speaker 1: addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. You
Speaker 1: can write It's just like this other instance of listener mail.
Speaker 1: So this one comes from Rain who is twelve years
Speaker 1: old and is from British Columbia, Canada, and says, I
Speaker 1: know that this isn't stuff you should know, but I
Speaker 1: think a couple of high coups should explain my suggestion.
Speaker 1: Here's my suggestion. It's such a great suggestion. Okay, here
Speaker 1: it goes. Actually, this just doesn't feel right for tech stuff. Well,
Speaker 1: I was wondering how Project natal X plus three sixty
Speaker 1: and the arc, but it is the art part of
Speaker 1: a new system, maybe PS four and the WEE is
Speaker 1: starting to drop in sales. Do you think they're going
Speaker 1: to make a new we I think this would be
Speaker 1: a great topic for a podcast. Well, we'll probably do
Speaker 1: a podcast about the future of video game consoles, But
Speaker 1: right now, I think we're stuck with what we've got
Speaker 1: for the next year. Yeah. I think it's probably gonna
Speaker 1: be a few years before any of these guys replace
Speaker 1: what they have out there with anything new, partially because
Speaker 1: the costs of research and development, um, and partially because
Speaker 1: people are still, you know, buying the old ones. Yep,
Speaker 1: I think, uh, I think pretty much we're gonna be
Speaker 1: stuck with that for the next couple of years, like
Speaker 1: you said, and uh, yeah, these these new devices look
Speaker 1: like they're going to be working with the the current
Speaker 1: generation game systems, and I think, um, I've heard rumors
Speaker 1: that there's going to be a high definition WE, But
Speaker 1: I don't think it's going to be a new machine
Speaker 1: other than the graphics output. Of course, the existing just
Speaker 1: won't necessarily work in you know, ten eight, you won't
Speaker 1: necessarily upscale. But but I don't think it's going to,
Speaker 1: you know, use a whole lot of new technology. I
Speaker 1: think it's going to be an incremental step to the
Speaker 1: WE one point five rather than the WE two point Now,
Speaker 1: if you write, well, thanks a lot, Rain and uh,
Speaker 1: thanks all of all to all of you for listening
Speaker 1: to our show. Remember we do a live show that's
Speaker 1: on Tuesday's at one pm Eastern. You can find a
Speaker 1: link to that through our blogs. Just go to house
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com and look along the right hand side.
Speaker 1: You'll find links over there and Chris and I will
Speaker 1: talk to you again, possibly about Google really soon. For
Speaker 1: moralness and thousands of other topics. Visit how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com and be sure to check out the new
Speaker 1: tech stuff blog now on the how Stuff Works homepage.
Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready, are you