27
theory on demand
turned out to be the key to Google’s subsequent success in the years to come: search results would in the future no longer be fixed once and for all, but would vary dynamically in accordance with the page’s position within the Web as a whole. 1.3 Google.com or How Ads (Discreetly) Entered the Pages Page and Brin went on developing and testing Google for eighteen months, making use of free tools provided by the Free and Open Source Software (F/OSS) community, and of the GNU/ Linux operating system. This enabled them to build up a system that is both modular and scalable to an extremely large extent, which can be augmented and tweaked even while being fully in use. This modular structure constitutes today the basis of Google’s data center, the ‘Googleplex’, and makes possible the maintenance, upgrade, changes and addition of features and software, without the need to ever interrupt the service. By the middle of 1998, Google attended to something like 10,000 queries a day, and the in-house array of servers Page and Brin had piled up in their rented room was on the verge of collapse. Finding funds vastly in excess to what usually is allocated to academic research therefore became a matter of some urgency. The story has it that Google’s exit from the university is due to a chance encounter with Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems and a talented old hand in the realm of IT. He became Google’s maiden investor to the tune of 100,000 US dollars. The birth of Google as a commercial enterprise went together with its first hires, needed for further development and maintenance of the data center. Among them was Greg Silverstein, now the CTO. Right from the beginning, Google’s data center took the shape of a starkly redundant system, where data is copied and stored in several places, so as to minimize any risk of data loss. Its most important feature is the possibility to add or remove modules at any given time so as to boost the efficiency of the system. Another major trump card, as befit university hackers, was Brin’s and Page’s habit to recycle and tweak second hand hardware and make extensive use of F/OSS. Their limited financial resources enabled them to evolve what would become the core of their business model: nimble modularity at all levels. The modularity of Google’s ecosystem means that it can scale up and down according to need and availability. No need to reprogram the system when new resources, whether hard-, wet- or software, is added: the highly dynamic structure integrates the new modules, even if they are stands-alone. Google formally opened its offices on September 7, 1998 in Menlo Park, California. As the story goes, Larry Brin opened the doors with a remote, since the offices were located in a garage a friend of theirs had sublet to the firm. A Spartan office-annex-garage then, but one featuring some not to be spurned comfort components: a washing machine, a dryer, and a spa. Right from the start, Google’s company philosophy is about making employees’ life very cushy indeed. By January 1999, Google left the Stanford Campus for good: