An Evening with Google’s Marissa Mayer
This is totally old, but it’s pretty interesting if you haven’t seen it. It’s basically a summary of a talk given by Marissa Mayer, Product Manager for Google, and details some interesting facts about Google. Among other things:
1. The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.
4. The infamous “I feel lucky” is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.
9. They have found in user testing, that a small number of people are very typical of the larger user base. They run labs continually and always monitoring how people use a page of results.
10. The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’
I’ve always wondered whether anyone actually ever used the “I’m feeling lucky” button. Firefox does the same thing, return the first Google result, if you type a word in the address bar without adding a domain suffix, and in my laziness I’ve grown addicted to it.
Anyway, read the rest of the post on Alan Williamson’s site for a bunch of other fun Google facts.