Alan Williamson, software developer for blog-city.com, posted great notes from a lecture given by Marissa Mayer at BayCHI lecture at PARC. Marissa, Product Manager for Google, released some interesting facts about Google. Here is a summary:
1. The Google home page is so bare because the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface.
2. In the earliest stage of Google, there was no the submit button rather a hit on the RETURN key.
3. Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests people were just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, they said “We are waiting for the rest of it” in reply to the “whats up?” question.
4. The “Did you mean…” feature, which is indeed a spell checker, works most effectively when placed at the bottom of the search results.
5. “I feel lucky” is nearly never used. It was a comfort button.
6. Orkut is very popular in Brazil. It was the brainchild of a Google engineer who was given free reign to run with it. No wonder it doesn’t look like Google at all.
7. Google use the 20%/5% rules. If at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the ‘Advanced Preferences’.
8. The name “Google” was the original founders’ typo.
9. Employees are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects. That’s why we have Google News and Orkut now.
See Alan’s full post here.