Fortune Magazine On Google Growing Up

prostoalex writes "Fortune Magazine runs a pretty long story on Google, but instead of the usual exultation over PageRank algorithm and Larry-and-Sergey biographies, we get a different message - is Google growing up, and is trouble brewing at Google? Here's Fortune's description of the pre-IPO days: 'Google has grown arrogant, making some of its executives as frustrating to deal with in negotiations as AOL's cowboy salesmen during the bubble. It has grown so fast that employees and business partners are often confused about who does what. A rise of stock- and option-stoked greed is creating rifts within the company. Employees carp that Google is morphing in strange and nerve-racking ways.'"

Good grief

>is Google growing up, and is trouble brewing at Google?

And can we get a 2000 word story out of it?

So what we need really is..

An open source search engine run by a business with an open source business plan. We should trust closed source business plans as much as we trust closed-source software.

Re:So what we need really is..

Nope.

Believe it or not, there are some applications that CANNOT BE EFFECTIVELY OPEN SOURCED.

Open sourcing a search engine would 100% guarantee absolute junk for results.

If I had access to the code behind PageRank, I could guarantee my clients get excellent pacement. Same with other people. Honest people who just put up a website/page would be left in the dust by spammers.

Other examples where obscurity is the ONLY security:

1. Code that states/federal revenue services use to flag accounts for audits. This code, in the public, would instantly destroy the revenue stream of the government. Accountants with programming skills could determine *exactly* what limits they could test and get away with. Every return filed would be for the maximum amount that the code would allow without triggering and audit.

2. Fraud detection code used by credit companies, service providers, etc. Armed with this code crackers would have free reign over credit cards and online payment systems. Exact patterns of usuage could be setup to guarantee that fraud flags would not be triggered.

3. Code that determines which passengers get flagged for pre-flight searches. Armed with this information criminals could fashion profiles that guarantee they will not be probed in-depth.

These four examples destroy your silly notion. Open Source is not a magic pill. A truly open source version of Google would be a useless tool within a matter of weeks, if not days.

Re:So what we need really is..

Believe it or not, there are some applications that CANNOT BE EFFECTIVELY OPEN SOURCED.

Open sourcing a search engine would 100% guarantee absolute junk for results.

Believe it or not, this would depend on HOW YOU DO IT.

I seem no reason why search engine technology couldn't be open sourced if it was approached in a sensible way from a technical viewpoint. After all, the technology of the internet itself is all open source, and yet we don't really get problems with companies trying to fiddle that software in their favour (for instance, randomly deleting packets from their competitors).

Re:So what we need really is..

Other examples where obscurity is the ONLY security:

1. Code that states/federal revenue services use to flag accounts for audits.

So change the code. Stop using hard limits, which is a stupid idea anyway, and start using score-based heuristics. The weightings aren't part of the code-base anyway, so analysis of the code won't give you much. Apply a random factor so the edges are fuzzy. People are going to try and find loopholes in the code and avoid audits anyway --- let 'em. If your code is good, the only way they can avoid audits is by not doing anything that requires auditing. Which is the whole point.

2. Fraud detection code used by credit companies, service providers, etc.

3. Code that determines which passengers get flagged for pre-flight searches.

Exactly the same things apply here. Hiding the problems doesn't prevent the problems. All it will do is prevent you from knowing the problems exist. Make the algorithms public and you can see the problems --- yes, they can be exploited, but they can also be fixed far more quickly, and improving the algorithms is the correct solution.

If Google released their source code, then yes, evil people could find loopholes and exploit them to artificially boost their rankings... but non-evil people, finding those same loopholes, could work out how to close the loopholes and submit the changes back for inclusion in the running code base. The end result? A better search engine.

Think of it in evolutionary terms. The spammers are evolving to take advantage of Google. Google is evolving to defend itself from them. Open-sourcing Google would speed up the process, that's all; which means we'd end up with a better search engine more quickly.

Re:So what we need really is..

I'm inclined to agree with you, but (you knew there was a but coming, didn't you?) I recall the flap a decade or so ago over the US IRS. They were flagging people who corrected minor mistakes by the IRS and paid what they thought was actually correct (where this was higher). Seems the IRS fell into the habit of calling this the "dumb but honest" flag. Remarks to that effect were even in the IRS's codebase. I don't think Open Source would work for the IRS any more than you do, but I also want to find a way for some sort of watchdog to quickly detect such things hiding in Closed Source applications, particularly ones used by the government, but possibly including private entities where they have become trusted keystones of the society. The IRS has actually become a better agency over the last ten years or so, but it took a lot of effort by congress to weed out problems that had become endemic and institutionalized.
So I guess the question is not should Google become Open Source, but should there be some auditing process for Closed Source code used by such entities, and if so, who should become the new watchman?

Re:So what we need really is..

You missed his point.

Google's "democratic" page ranking techniques, a part of which is called PageRankTM(C), are unknown entities -- the most we know about how Google ranks pages is based upon trial and error, observations, and some basics like "links from powerful sites improve your ranking". This is intentional as Google wants to avoid sites "stuffing the ballot box", if you will.

If "Search Engine Optimizers" had the source code for Google, it would be a "arms race" of SEOs battling to perfectly match whatever search boosting criteria Google uses - perhaps it wants a certain page churn, or URL length and content, or certain word choices, etc.

Phooey. What a load of spin.

"Google's foes have a much firmer hold on customers", argued some bloke who wrote a book about Google, so is an immediate expert.

Perhaps. But Google has a much firmer hold on the search technology, and at least in this market, the technology is important. Google as a business need to sort out its stuff (perhaps, we don't really know), but I'd guess that the vast majority of the planet who use search engines, use google, and that can't be bad...

Simon.

Heading for a fall

The weird hiring policy reminds me of James Dyson (the vacuum cleaner tycoon). He's done OK out of it personally, but competitors have caught up with the cyclone technology [1] and the public are realising that 250UKP for a plastic hoover (which breaks easily) is about twice the market rate. He's recently outsourced manufacture of the cleaners to the Far East and has made a lot of redundancies in a small English town where Dyson was the biggest employer. He famously refused to employ graduates on the basis that they had been brainwashed and couldn't think for themselves any more.

Google got where it was largely because of the crapness of AltaVista, Yahoo and Hotbot et al; at least some of these have now woken up and smelt the coffee.[1] not new in itself; they've been used for dust extraction in industry for decades

Google's efficacy

Also, anyone else noticed that Google itself is getting less effective lately? Some searches I make, the first 2 pages all go to the same advertiser's site except all the links have different domain names; I think they're figuring out how to exploit its page ranking. Other searches I get tons of 404s, especially with image search, and the images aren't cached except as thumbnails so it's even more annoying.

Re:Google's efficacy

I think they're figuring out how to exploit its page ranking.

You're right about that. Advertiser techniques are presently far ahead of anything pagerank can do to outwit them. Some of them are getting remarkably sophisticated. For more info, search on "blogspam" for example.

Should be interesting to see

Provided they retain their philosophy of not damaging their product - the end-user experience - I'm not overly worried about Google's continued existence. The copanies planning to compete have generally shown a tendency to occasionally break that rule, and I believe that tendency will tend to drive consumers back to Google. until a competitor with a similar philosophy arrives, Google will remain king of the search engines.

But that leads to the question of what Google will do during its reign. ARE we seeing dot-com arrogance? This isn't a new phenomenon - Apple suffered the same thing back in the early 80s.

Well, I look forward to the IPO and seeing where Google intends to go from there.

Eight words...

"All good things must come to an end."

Not that I'd hope this is the way it goes, but it's entierly possible it does. Has happened before and will happen again.

Google translator doing well

Well, at least the Google translator is doing well, repeated use seems to have generated: Employees carp that Google is morphing in strange and nerve-racking ways.

Trade name

I think Google has something very important. It is now almost a generic name now for searching. I know a lot of computer illiterate people who have heard of Google, and have no idea that there are other search engines out there, and that google IS the internet's search engine. As long as people hold on to the association of the word "Google" with "searching" they will have no problem.

summary

Summary of the article:
"Oh no, there's this company here that values engineers highly, and does all sorts of wacky non-corporate stuff. How can they survive ?
They must behave more like other dot-com companies, otherwise they /might/ be doomed.
"

All in all an odd article, since google is one of the few prospering .com bubble survivors, who survived /because/ they were different.

Fast growth in power breeds arrogance

The process of fast gaining power has always resulted in growing arrogance, see for instance Microsoft.
Unfortunately it also applies to Open Source companies. Sigh.

Re:Fast growth in power breeds arrogance

My favorite part of that story, about M$.

Then there's Microsoft. The company has an army of brainiacs working on incorporating web search into MSN and its new operating system, code-named Longhorn, due out in 2006. It plans to be able to index every user's hard drive and use the information to provide better searches. "All I'll say is that search is vitally important to us," says Chris Payne, Microsoft's executive in charge of search.

That right there is in a nutshell why Microsoft doesn't get it. Users don't want the contexts of their hard drives indexed and shipped off to the highest bidder for them to generate marketing to them. That's the equivalent of a door to door salesmen breaking into my house and taking an inventory of everything I own so he can try to sell me what I don't when he interupts what I am doing with 10 more door to door salesmen at the front door.

My company

My company has been around a few more years that Google, but it is going through a similar situation. We have expanded greatly over the past 5 years and now the company is starting to lose focus on what made it a success in the first place. Now the focus is entirely on maximizing revenue and maximizing profits with little care for future consequenses. I expect that my company will be a lumbering giant before too long, just like everyone else in our industry.

Google has no problem.

For those of you who hadn't heard -- Google recently blew minds in the advertisng scene by being voted the most recognized brand in the WORLD -- over Coke, GM, BMW, FedEx, IBM, Microsoft, you name it.

the voters were senior advertising execs. perhaps you saw this news earlier this year. it was truly a shocker to the usual suspects (the suits), as Google accomplished this amazing feat in just a few years and with virtually ZERO bucks spent on advertising.

Re:Google has no problem.

- Google recently blew minds in the advertisng scene by being voted the most recognized brand in the WORLD -- over Coke, GM, BMW, FedEx, IBM, Microsoft, you name it.

That survey must have been complete nonsense. There is a very large world population that has never received so much as a single packet from the internet. I'll bet quite a few of them have drunk some Coke though.

GM, BMW, FedEX and the computer lot - yep, can understand that (though not agree). But Coke? Utter nonsense - Coke penetrates both high and low tech markets, something Google simply cannot do.

I'd be interested to see the nature of this survey - do you have a link?

Cheers,
Ian

when is going public good for a company?

Really, going public does only one instantaneous good thing for a company, raise some instant cash, and a good thing for the owners of the company, raise some more cash for them.

After that, it's a big burden, the company has to follow a whole new set of rules, publish accounts, be subject to pressures from shareholders for instant returns, etc. etc.

Anyway, maybe there is an economist out there who can explain to me why it is good for a company to be listed on the stockmarket as opposed to being in private ownerships. Is there any more to it than a one-off sum of instant cash?

Ponxx

Re:when is going public good for a company?

IANAE, but RTFA, they will have to follow these rules anyway because of the large number of option/stock holders (probably mostly employees), in this case, not going public is unfair to these option/stock holders, because it will enable them to cash in or diversify their portfolio.

Plus, being public means they can always issue stock if they need to raise money (e.g. for buying microsoft), they can buy back stock too.

Being public gives the company valuation, strong valuation carry some serious negotiation power with it, even if they will not want to dilute ownership they can use stock as collateral for loans or basis for issuing bonds.

Good question

The main rational for going public, from the company's point of view, is the fact that employees will be more motivated by the fact that their share options have a cash value set by the market, rather than by the company. There is a secondary reason, which is that having publicly traded shares creates a currency for acquiring other companies.

This logic works best when you are dealing with a company that does not generate dividends. When you have dividends, then shareholders get their rewards from these, and so there is less of a need to go public. The problem is, it takes time for companies to mature to the extent that they pay dividends, and everyone involved is generally too impatient to wait.

Having said that, it's usually the shareholders and the management who decide to go public, not the workers. The main reason for an IPO, in reality, is to allow venture capitalists and management to cash in, generally by capitalizing on market hype. This was the pattern for the nineties - everyone involved in taking the decision is in favour of the IPO: VCs and management want the cash, and the investment bankers and lawyers and accountants want the fees. And the press wants an interesting story. And, sadly, the investing public (including their so-called professional advisers in the mutual funds) seems to be willing to buy into all of this.

There have been suggestions that Google is worth $25 bln, in the press, who generally know nothing. Even if it's half that, then it's still valued at more than 10 times revenue. Just to give you an indication, my company will be criticised by its board, and the analysts, if we pay more than 2 times revenue for a company.

So you are right, that the main interest is a one-off sum of cash, plus the hope that you will be able to attract good staff with options, even though most of the upside from options has already been appropriated by the early movers. And that you might be able to use your inflated stock to buy other companies. It's known as the "bigger fool" theory of company valuation - you might think this is a silly price for our company, but we're sure that you will be able to find a bigger fool further on down the line.

Fortune == Hack Job - what is the real story?

Fortune and the author of the article is notorious for taking comments/events out of context and blowing them into a story that is not really there. This certainly fits the pattern - and account of outrageous behaviour followed by carping loosely sourced but based on what competitors (and snubbed suitors = MSFT) are saying. Can any of the "engineers and other geeks attending a conference on Internet search" comment on accuracy of the characterization of Brin's Q&A session as being like "a rock star being asked to play his greatest hit one ... more ... time?"

Duh.

Centralize power, toss in Greed, hire ex-NSA employees (yes, this is the case), and WHAT DID YOU EXPECT????

Remember the days when you used Altavista? --And when there were millions of personal webpages with, what did they call them. . , LINKS??? which led you across the wide and complex internet to find amazing pools of data and knowledge? Where people were required to think and explore in order to find things? Where cool and interesting top ranking, easy to find information was decided upon by pro-active linking controlled by millions of small webmasters and not some Google algorithm and the corporate advertising dollar?

The web is not supposed to have ONE main junction for data retrieval. Google is like a news-bite. It's easy, it's fast, it's incomplete, and worst of all, it makes everybody lazy, dependant and the SAME.

I am sick to death with the geek world fawning over this massive problem waiting to happen. It's about bloody time people began to realize the potential hazards with this sort of consolidation of power.

What? Because Google happens to use a Fischer Price color scheme, people think it's incapable of harm?

I am actually slightly more disgusted with people over this subject than I am with their complicity in the bullshit going down in the Middle East. If people are determined to walk around in their comfy bubble of ignorant bliss while massive systems congregate to fuck them over, then they deserve exactly what they get. You will be drafted and you will have the internet taken away from you. --And the 'best' part is that the small number of aware people get fucked over right along with everybody else, thanks to the tectonic plate-moving population masses of the child-minded.

-FL

Re:Duh.

Ok, I'll bite. For one thing, search engines have been around before there even was a WWW (remember gopher?). Secondly, there is no inherent design to the web - it just grew this way. Noone (well, apart from you) decided that search engines were not allowed. Thirdly, when I need a specific type of information I do not have time to linksurf for a couple of days. Doing so would be foolish, since a couple of seconds on Google can get me to the same places.

I certainly recognize that Google presents a weakness in the web. For example, it could be used for censhorship by simply hiding undesirable information. It is also arguably a critical point in the web infrastructure, with all associated dangers. However, neither of these problems seem too severe. Attempts at censhorship would be overcome by massive numbers of bloggers, who have large readerships and would raise an enormeous outcry if such a thing were to happen. And if Google falls of the edge of the web, there are still plenty other search engines that can take its place.

As for Google being more harmful than the situation in the middle east, I won't comment other than by saying "nice troll".

Google changing search results for profit?

In the last week, Google did a change to their algorithms which effectively eliminated most of the top-rated businesses from search results.

It has been suggested that they are doing this to force businesses to use Adwords so that their valuation can be increased in the IPO.

What apparently happened was that for any keywords which are actively bid for in Adwords, Google applied a filter making it very hard for legitimate businesses to get any ranking in normal search results.

Here is an application which was built to show the difference between current and previous results (before the new keywords filters were applied by Google) www.scroogle.org/ [scroogle.org].

This message [seochat.com] has some good data and a summary of the argument.

What makes this so worrying is that Google made its reputation on objectively good search results. If they are now distorting results in pursuit of cash, they're LESS objective than search engines which have explicit pay for placement, like Overture: in those search engines you can at least see which results are paid for and which are actually real.

Farewell Google. We hardly knew ye.

Re:Google changing search results for profit?

We had a long discussion [slashdot.org] on this just yesterday. I don't see the point of repeating everything again today. But I don't think your conspiracy theories are plausible -- Google were trying to get rid of spam, and may have been over-zealous, but I don't think they were deliberately trying to worsen their search results; they know that will lead to a very quick death.

One other sign of Google going down: Google Groups

About a year ago, I found out that it was suddenly not possible to post anymore in "old" Google Groups discussion.

When you are ready to post, click on the "Post a Follow-up" link below the text of the message to which you wish to reply. Please note that follow-up links only appear on messages that are less than a month old.

I don't get it! At the time I found a solution to a problem that was posted, I just wanted to add that solution but could not! What's the point?

cause: newsnet behind Google Groups

Not being able to reply to an old, archived news message in Google Groups doesn't seem so strange/bad to me:

Google groups is basically only an interface/archive to the existing internet newsgoup mechanism. If you'd reply to a year-old message in some newsgroup that got archived in google groups... you would be sending a reply to the newsgroup itself, thereby giving the whole readership of that newsgroup (let's say some 200 people) an answer to a year-old question.

Seen in this light, I wouldn't count this against google.

Reinout

Businesses are like organisms...

The idea that businesses are "run" is somewhat of a illusion. In fact, businesses run themselves once they get beyond a basic size, and they follow rules (like Zipf's law) which (appear to)govern their size and market position.

Of course a business has a culture, and this affects the way it works, but a culture is like a strategy: theft, honesty, quality, exploitation... all choices made in order to improve the odds of winning at what is always a gamble.

No surprise that as Google gets larger, its culture would change: it is entering new domains, needs to adapt, has many new people, each with their ideas and influence.

The "give the customer what they want" culture is very strong at Google, and is the reason for their success up to now. But it is only a successful strategy when it makes a difference. When Google find themselves needing to defend a captive market (of advertisers), fight off hostile intruders (like Microsoft), and change its definition of "customer" (from people doing the searches to people placing adverts), it will also change as a company. This is what is happening now.

Zipf's Law is fun, BTW. It explains the relationship between size and power, in summary it states that in a self-adjusting system, power is balanced out at all levels. I.e. in a market, the largest business will be about twice as large as the two second-largest businesses, about three times as large as the next three businesses, and so on.

The same kind of organic maths applies to cities, earthquakes, and natural languages.

well duh

Obviously, Google can only go down. Their people are "arrogant" because they know they have the right product, and refuse to kowtow to business people who have no new ideas and only know how to do business one way.

After the IPO, Google will grow crappier and crappier, and eventually become Just Another Site. This crappiness will be mandated by the businessmen who will control the company. Since a businessman's goal is not to make a profit, but to maximize profits, Google will begin abusing its position, and in general, becoming more like the Microsoft of web searches. They'll make their site less informative, remove the "fun" stuff like the enchefilizer and Google Groups, and in general behave like assholes. That's what businessmen do!

All we can do is hope a new contender steps up. But, this probably won't happen. Sigh.

6 coders, a fat pipe or two, and a million dollars

is all it takes to replicate a smaller google until the cash starts coming.
Sadly, their niche is getting easier to replicate as hardware becomes cheaper.
If the first 50 search results for "cups" want to sell me a cup, I'l l increasingly turn to another search engine to find my information. The next wave though, is the sort of AI that can rate pages or servers based on their quality of information. \

Show me a search engine that can distinguish between an Erica Rose pic and a Mother Teresa pic, without the filename, and I'll invest, until then: it's all just bullshit and more piles of bullshit.

did you mean bullshiat?

The Next Google

Assuming that Google did something stupid (i.e. like Altavista's turning into a portal), who do you think would become the next Google?

I'd hope it would be Alltheweb [alltheweb.com], but I know they are unknown in the real world, even if their results are nearly google-level in quality.

I fear it would be a great opportunity for Microsoft to seize yet another market...

Medieval Modernity

It's easy to picture Microsoft using its Windows monopoly to lasso people into using its search--even if its search is slightly clunkier than Google's. That scenario won't happen, says Brin. He thinks the company with the superior technology will triumph...

Yep. It always has been that way in the past. Superior technology has always vanquished Microsoft's clunkiness.

I don't trust this article - coming from Forbes - and that's a reporter's paraphrase, at best, rather than a quote of Brin, but that much seems a reasonable portrayal of their attitude, and an Achilles' heel. This goofy belief that some tech god will see to it that the technically inept cannot prevail in combat.

Still, I agree with a post above - having *a* search engine for the net is not something I'd be rooting for anyway.

Decrease In Linking Over Time

Something I have been wondering about is will the massive adoption of tools like google start result in a reduction of linking, hence undermining the very web that google (and many other engines) crawls.

I know I don't bother with many links these days - whats the point when I can use google to search for it, the open directory to find by category (or even on the odd occaision Yahoo). Even if I am looking for something similar I don't even have to web crawl for it - you can just Show Similar to find it.

I stating the assumption that others are also doing this - and if this is so, then won't the ability of page rank and similar link "usefulness" evaluation algorithims to produce good results degrade?

Any thoughts....?


Keep Lamb Chop On Top - SETI - The Team Lamb Chop Gauntlet [teamlambchop.com]

Frustrating

"Google has grown arrogant, making some of its executives as frustrating to deal with in negotiations as AOL's cowboy salesmen during the bubble. "

So they're frustrating to negotiate with just because someone [slashdot.org] didn't get [slashdot.org] their way?

Will Google culture change with the move?

Over the last week Google has moved their corporate offices, to the old HQ of SGI (who is still hanging on in one building). Their old offices were extraordinarily crowded but had lots of character (buildings 0, pi and e). The new building sounds nice (more space, glass walls everywhere, lots of conference rooms and the usual late-90's tech boom perks and toys). But who knows what a change like that will do to corporate culture.

Also, if some business development types are being arrogant in outside meetings, that's a problem, but doesn't mean the whole company is that way.

The gaping flaw with this article...

The gapin flaw with this article is that it take the typical suit view of Google. Google's founders have one overriding principal that guides everything, "Don't be evil," which has lead to it's continued success. Things like "locking in" customers would be the death knell of Google, as it's simplistic and quick search are what attracted it's user base to begin with.

Their successful advertising initiative likewise mirrored the message. People don't like being treated like a commodity to be "locked in", especially not the droves of nerds on the internet. I'd be highly suspect that ANY of the "competing" search companies would steal away any of google's userbase, as they will all try and do things for their own benefit that will ultimately make them seem worse in a head to head comparison against google.

Simply...

take a look at this [google.com] and tell me one single company that has such ideas, technology and momentum as google. This article talks about google as if Google is planning to stay as it is for the next decade, ofcorse not.... they might be stupid(which i doubt), but they have so much ideas and "know-how" in their heads they can re-revolutionize (i cant say that word again :)) the web search
technology.

Ruh roh

In a year I'll be crying after google fails to deliver, and I'll go back to the internet archive's time machine. Then I'll be puzzled by the 2001 google not working.

Get out my tinfoil hat!

I'm surprised that no one has pointed out a pattern I see here in these 100 incidents:

000) About 2 months ago Microsoft executive Jim Allchin said condescendingly: "Google's a very nice system, but compared to my vision, it's pathetic."

001) Microsoft may have offered to buy Google right before it is set to go public, but Google turns them down.

010) Google changes it's program in an attempt to get better weighted results and gets bad press from business about it.

011) Word "leaks out" that SCO may be planning to sue Google for not paying them the "license" tax.

100) Fortune publishes a negative article about Google's management.

All this happens just as Google is about to offer it's IPO and just as M$ is starting it's own online search engine. Tons of negative press for Google, lots of praise for M$'s "forward thinking" on search technology. Coincidence? I think not...

Davey B. This eCS-OS/2 (Warp 4.52) system uptime is 14 days 06 hrs 42 mins and 22 secs

And forbes has what credibility left?

Exactly.

Not all that important...

What people seem to overlook about google, is that it brought searching out of the stone-age, and forced everyone else to improve greatly, or die out. No longer are searches riddled with links to unrelevant material like porn, link-farms, etc. (Well, there are some, but still only with rather uncommon search terms). If google dies (like many very good companies have before) it will certainly be a sad day, but we can all move on and not be much worse off.

The reason we can live without Google, is it's legacy... Other search engines like Yahoo finally invested the money in improving their own search engines, so that they get results almost as good a Google. Unfortunately (and the reason they can't possibly beat-out Google) their goal is only to match, they could have done a bit more work and been better, and innovative, rather than just imitators.

So, google may go away eventually, but their legacy shall remain, and we are all better for it.

Forbes store gets it half right

Since I taught Sergey when he was an undergraduate at Maryland, and have done some consulting at Google, I can offer some insight on on Forbes article.

The Forbes article is right that Google is very selective in their hiring, and puts a premium on intelligence over experience. However, the claim that you need a degree from a top-10 university is bogus. Actually, one thing that helps a lot is a graduate degree. I believe the current situation is that they have more people on the engineering staff with PhDs than with BS degrees (and more people with Masters degrees than either).

One of the interesting things about the Google engineering team is the number of people who had previously done research in topics such as compiler optimization than have no relation to Google's business. They just hire smart people.

I understand that a number of people are upset by recent changes in Google's ranking scheme and the fact that it isn't public or open source. The thing you have to understand is that Google will be forever in a war with the people doing "Search Engine Optimization". These people don't care about having Google return the best result for "ceiling fan", they just want their web site selling ceiling fans to be on the first page.

The initial papers on the Page Rank algorithm assumed a web that was unaffected by the page ranking algorithm. Now, with Google being a dominate search engine, a substantial part of the web is designed to influence Google's search ranking. Figuring out a search ranking algorithm that works well in that context is very hard, and would be impossible if it was public or open source. The SEO people would 0wn it in a moment.

A problem I've noted with Google in the past few years is that a search for anything that people are trying to sell, like "ceiling fans", mostly returned links to web stores selling that product. The newest ranking for "ceiling fans" includes other links as well, such as informative web sites on installation, manufacturers and energy conservation. So it seems like an improvement to me.

Clearly, managing a company that is growing like Google is growing is a challenge. But I'm not sure anyone else could do it better.