I noticed today that there are an absolutely amazing amount of news stories being released about our favorite search company Google. I figured it might be good to post a collection of them in one place 🙂
To start with, Marisa Mayer is Google’s 20th employee and is one the main people driving the search company’s successive, innovative products. There are two articles about her over at Business Week at the moment — both of them quite interesting and both offering some insight into how the company operates, including tid-bits about it’s corporate culture.
From the first linked article:
Part of Mayer’s challenge is realizing when certain formulas falter. For years she ran the company’s Top 100 priorities list, which ranked projects by order of importance. But as Google’s workforce grew, the list soared to more than 270 projects. Last year Google execs decided it had run its course, and shut it down. “People don’t get attached to the processes themselves at Google,” says Bret Taylor, product manager for Google Maps. “It’s very unusual. Even at small companies, people tend to say: ‘This is the way we do X.”‘
Moving along, over at Silicon Beat (The San Jose Mercury News’ blog), there’s an article about how Google has apparently ended it’s year-long boycott of the tech-news site CNET. From that article:
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt has had a phone interview with CNET, the article says. That comes after Schmidt himself had supposedly imposed a year-long ban on the organization for publishing personal information about him that was easily retrievable with Google’s search engine.
Wow. Lesson learned. Don’t tick off Mr. Schmidt 😉
Then again on the Silicon Beat, there is a post about an unconfirmed report that Google is to open a research facility at NASA Ames in Mountain View. Apparently this will be officially announced later this afternoon.
Meanwhile, Ars Technica is reporting about Google being sued over it’s print library project. The Authors Guild states:
“This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law,” said Authors Guild president Nick Taylor. “It’s not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied.”
Personally, I wish people would relax about copyright issues — especially when it comes to sharing work for educational pursuits — but, hey, what do I know? 😉 Here’s Google’s take on the issue.
Finally, (I picked this one up off the Del.icio.us Popular feed) a tool that is strikingly similar to Twingine results, Gahoo!Yoogle appears to be a more robust version of the former, offering image, news, shopping and directory results from both Google and Yahoo! in a nifty split-screen format.
So, that concludes our collection of Google headlines for the day, with one small exception that I’m sure you’ll get a great laugh from 🙂 Happy Surfing!!