Google (incorporated 1998)

One of the least evil of the big tech companies of the early 21st century, partly because Sergey Brin's parents fled from the Soviet Union and so he is anti censorship, although they have been tempted by it.

Google only succeeds at highly algorithmic tasks or at giving infinite storage to users to then mine their data.

It is incapable however of adding any obvious useful end user features to most of its products, most of which get terminated and cannot be relied on:

This also seems to extend to business-to-business: twitter.com/MohapatraHemant/status/1343969802080030720 ex-Googler tells how they lost the cloud to Amazon.

More mentions of that:

Too many genius engineers. They need some dumber people like Ciro Santilli who need to write documentation to learn stuff.

Ciro Santilli actually attempted two interviews to work at Google in the early 2010's but very quickly failed both on the first phase, because you have to be a fast well trained coding machine to pass that interview.

Ciro later felt better about himself by fantasizing how he would actually do more important things outside of Google and that they would beg to buy him instead.

He was also happy that he wouldn't have to use Google crazy internal tools: someone once said that Google's tools make easy tasks middle hard, and they also make impossible tasks middle hard. TODO source.

But whatever the case: Ciro will not, ever, spend his time drilling programmer competition problems to join a company.

www.wired.com/story/google-shakes-up-its-tgif-and-ends-its-culture-of-openness/ "GOOGLE TGIF 1999 video". TGIF is the weekly all hands meeting abolished in 2019: www.wired.com/story/google-shakes-up-its-tgif-and-ends-its-culture-of-openness/

The 1997 Wayback Machine archives are just priceless: web.archive.org/web/19971210065425/http://backrub.stanford.edu/backrub.html. I'm so glad that website exists and started so early. It is just another university research project demo website like any other. Priceless.

Craig Silverstein was the first employee hired, in 1998: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge

In August 1998 they had an their first investment of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun Microsystems co-founder. Some sources say September 1998. This was an event of legend, the dude dropped by, tested the website for a few minutes, said I like it, and dropped a 100$ check with no paperwork. Google wasn't even incorporated, they had to incorporate to cash the check. They were apparently introduced by one of the teachers, TODO which. Some sources say he had to rush off to another meeting afterwards:

Tried to sell it for 1 million in early 1999... OMG the way the world is. It would be good to learn more about that story, and when they noticed it was fuckup.

One of Google's most interesting stories is how their startup garage owner became an important figure inside Google, and how Sergei married her sister. These were the best garage tenants ever!

Bibliography:

This was the original name of Google Search.

One wonders if this name has some influence from the LGBT culture in San Francisco! The sexual innuendo is palpable.

"Back" is of course a reference to "backlinks", since Google Search relies on incoming links (AKA backlinks) to a webpage to determine its importance.

The guy who coded the initial version of BackRub, the first version of Google Search, but left before the company formed. TODO how did he meet Largey Brage? Why did he leave Google?

In 1997 he cofounded eGroups, a mailing list management website, together with the mysterious Carl Victor Page, Jr., Larry Page's older brother. eGroups was sold to Yahoo! in 2000 for $432m, just before the Dot-com bubble burst.

As of 2021 his net worth was of "only" $1b, even though his original Google shares would have been worth $13b. He must have sold too much too early to do other cool stuff. archive.ph/IgkMI:

When Mr. Page and Mr. Brin founded Google in 1998, Mr. Hassan bought 160,000 shares for $800. When Google went public in 2004, the shares were worth more than $200 million. The shares, now in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, would be valued at more than $13 billion today [2021].

Did Largey give him this nice deal as a way to thank him for helping start the company, or was it just that they had no big hopes and $800 seemed right? youtu.be/pmXDtTD6vQY?t=146 suggests the stocks were part of his compensation for 3 months of coding work. Also mentioned at: nypost.com/2021/08/20/google-founder-created-revenge-site-against-estranged-wife

In 2001, Scott married a Vietnamese chick called Allison Huynh from university and they had three children.

In 2014 Hassan asked for a divorce, and the proceedings were a shitshow, lasting more than 7 years.

In 2004 he tried strike a $20 million^[ref] post-nuptial after Google went public, which she declined, so things were already crappy back then.

Then, during the divorce, Scott even created a revenge website for her as well. He's so petty! Down as of 2024 of course. There are only some weird redirect archives now: web.archive.org/web/20210915000000*/https://allisonhuynh.com redirecting to sites.google.com/view/allisonhuynhcom

The divorce is covered in several major outlets:

To be fair, he did work on a lot of cool stuff after BackRub for which he deserves credit, not the least the company that created the Robot Operating System, which is a cool sounding open source project, which is awesome. But this divorce story is so damning! He should just own up to it, split the cash, and move on... The fact that the Google money came from an investment before marriage likely complicates things.

The fact that he does not have a Wikipedia page as of 2022 is mind blowing, especially after divorce details. Maybe Ciro Santilli will create it one day. Just no patience now. OK, done it June 2022: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Hassan let's see if it lasts. The page lasted but ended up being Ciro Santilli's first Edit war, how exciting:

Looking a the history, he just kept revealing different IPs and continuously reverting, which other people put back in. Another of his IPs:There is also an interesting edit from 2600:1700:5470:5c50:7566:9580:1b60:ab41 which mentions without source the little known fact

after working at Washington University's Medical Libraries Group (having been recruited out of SUNY Buffalo for the summer).

so it could be Hassan adding some actually good and interesting information to the article. That one however also has an edit to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Nagel so maybe it's not him.

Scott Hassan's ex-wife. She is a "Vietnam immigrant who attended Stanford University on a full scholarship".^[ref]

Allison Huynh's zombie gaming company.

Their URL was: www.mydreaminteractive.com, with several evolving captures: web.archive.org/web/20160127075812/http://mydreaminteractive.com/

Their flagship seems to have been this game: "MyDream" store.steampowered.com/app/348860/MyDream/, a Roblox-like. This is seen in 2015 at on web archive.

They had a child educational focus and also made some attempts in cryptocurrency.

Company co-founded by Scott Hassan, early Google programmer at Stanford University, and Carl Victor Page, Jr., Larry Page's older brother.

They were an email list management website, and became Yahoo! Groups after the acquisition.

The company was sold to Yahoo! in August 2000 for $432m and became Yahoo! Groups. They managed to miraculously dodge the Dot-com bubble, which mostly poppet in 2021. After the acquisition, Yahoo started to redirect them to: groups.yahoo.com as can be seen on the Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/20000401000000*/egroups.com The first archive of groups.yahoo.com is from February 2001: web.archive.org/web/20010202055100/http://groups.yahoo.com/ and it unsurprisingly looks basically exactly like eGroups.

Scott Hassan's shitty telepresence robot startup. Looking at the demos it is so painfully obvious why they failed, that feeble tall screen on wheels. But hindsight is 20/20... It is almost as bad as OurBigBook.

The most notable usage of the product is Snowden Snowbot, which is sad, the product name seems to have been "Beam". Who would use that if not for theatrics with an exilee when everyone already has a screen in front of their face all the time?^[ref]

At least this phase produced some of the only videos of Hassan in existence such as:He's got a perfect american accent, so likely not a first generation immigrant.

Bibliography:

archive.org/details/isbn_9780385342728 on the Internet Archive Open Library.

Has some good mentions, but often leaves you wanting more details of how certain things happened, especially the early days stuff.

Does however paint a good picture of several notable employees, and non-search projects from the early 2000's including:

Paints a very positive picture of the founders. It is likely true. They gave shares generously to early employees. Tried to allow the more general public to buy from IPO, by using a bidding scheme, rather than focusing on the big bankers as was usual.

The introduction mentions that Google is very interested in molecular biology and mining genetics data, much like Ciro Santilli! Can't find external references however...

Two of the most compelling areas that Google and its founders are quietly working on are the promising fields of molecular biology and genetics. Millions of genes in combination with massive amounts of biological and scientific data are an excellent match for the Google search engine, the tremendous database the company has in place, and its immense computing power. Already, Google has downloaded a map of the human genome and is working closely with biologist Dr. Craig Venter and other leaders in genetics on scientific projects that may lead to important breakthroughs in science, medicine, and health. In other words, we may be heading toward a time when people can google their own genes.

The book gives good highlight as to why Google became big: search was just an incredibly computationally intensive task. From very early days, Largey were already making up their own somewhat custom compute systems from very early days, which naturally led into Google custom hardware later on. Google just managed to pull ahead on the reinvest revenue into hardware loop, and no one ever caught them back. This feels more the case than e.g. with Amazon, which notoriously had to buy off dozens of competitors to clear the way.

Their UI is horrendous as of 2020:

I need this for OurBigBook.com!! webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/104241/can-google-analytics-track-url-fragment-in-url

They removed referrer path completely in GA4... OMG WTF are they doing!

They scanned a bunch of books, and then allowed search results to hit them. They then only show a small context around the hit to avoid copyright infringement.

Bibliography:

When they disabled this from Chromium, it was one of the things that prompted Ciro Santilli to switch to Proton Pass.

Very similar to OurBigBook.com!

Wikipedia reads:

Any contributor could create and own new Knol articles, and there could be multiple articles on the same topic with each written by a different author.

so basically exactly what Ciro Santilli wants to do on OurBigBook.com. Ominous.

Like any closed source "failure", everything was deleted. wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Knol

www.zdnet.com/article/googles-quantum-focused-sandbox-division-is-being-spun-off/ Google's quantum-focused Sandbox division is being spun off (2022)

When Ciro finally understood that this is a play on Larry Page's name (of course it is, typical programmer/academic humor stuff), his mind blew.

Was adopted by AskJeeves in 2001.

The Google Story Chapter 11. "The Google Economy" comments:

As they saw it, generation one was AltaVista, generation two was Google, and generation three was Teoma, or what Ask Jeeves came to refer to as Expert Rank. Teoma's technology involved mathematical formulas and calculations that went beyond Google's PageRank system, which was based on popularity. In fact, the concept had been cited in the original Stanford University paper written by Sergey Brin and Larry Page as one of the methods that could be used to rank indexed Web sites in response to search requests. "They called their method global popularity and they called this method local popularity, meaning you look more granularly at the Web and see who the authoritative sources are," Lanzone said. He said Brin an Page had concluded that local popularity would be exceedingly difficult to execute well, because either it would require too much processing power to do it in real time or it would take too long.

googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/03/expertrank-authoritative-search.html mentions

ExpertRank is an evolution of IBM's CLEVER project, a search engine that never made it to public.

and:

The difference between PageRank and ExpertRank is that for ExpertRank the quality of the page is important and that quality is not absolute, but it's relative to a subject.

There are other more recent algorithms with similar names, and are prehaps related:

PageRank was apparently inspired by it originally, given that.

Google has put considerable effort into custom hardware to greatly optimize its stack, in a way that is quite notable compared to other tech companies.

E.g. about.google/ in 2022.

The Google Story suggests that this practice existed in academia, where it was brought from. But I can't find external references to it easily:

At Google, the preference is for working in small teams of three, with individual employees expected to allot 20 percent of their time to exploring whatever ideas interest them most. The notion of "20 percent time" is borrowed from the academic world, where professors are given one day a week to pursue private interests.

Bibliography:

The outcome of Larry Page and Sergey Brin performing a Dragon Ball fusion dance.

Both of them attended Montessori education at some point. Interesting! Mentioned in a talk by Sergey and highlighted at The Google Story.

As The Google Story puts it about Largey:

Scholarship was not just emphasized in their homes; it was treasured.

Ciro Santilli likes that.

Larry Page's father.

Carl is mentioned in The Google Story Chapter 2 "When Larry Met Sergey".

He divorced from Larry's mother Gloria in 1980 or 1981, "when he [Page] was eight years old" according to The Google Story. He then moved on to Joyce Wildenthal, another MSU professor. Larry had a good relation with both Gloria and Joyce:

Larry came to feel that he was showered with love and wisdom from two mothers: his real mom, and Joyce Wildenthal, a Michigan State professor who had a long-term relationship with his dad.

His obituary on the website of the Michigan State University, where he taught most of his life: www.cse.msu.edu/Alumni_Friends/Alumni/PageMemorial.php:

Page served as CSE’s [MSU Department of Computer Science and Engineering] first graduate director and had a critical role in promoting the department’s research mission. In 1967, when he joined MSU, the computer science program consisted of only undergraduate courses. Just three years later, the department offered eighteen graduate courses in computer science.

[...]

Page taught courses in Automata and Formal language theory and Artificial intelligence. He was a beloved teacher and mentor to innumerable students until his death in 1996.

Larry Pages's older brother.

It is hard to find information on this little bugger! Not a single photo online!

As suggested by the "Jr.", he is named after Larry's father, Carl Victor Page.

Carl Jr. is mentioned in a few places in the book The Google Story. The full name "Carl Victor Page Jr." is never given in that source, only "Carl Page Jr." is used. These crazy Anglo-Saxons and their semi-optional middle names!

The Google Story does not cite its sources, but it likely got much of its insider information through interviews, e.g. Chapter 2. "When Larry Met Sergey":

Carl Jr. recalls Larry as an inquisitive younger brother with wide-ranging interests

which suggests the authors actually interviewed Carl Jr., since interviews with Carl Jr. cannot be found anywhere else on the Internet. It would be interesting to know more how they got that level of access.

Chapter 2 mentions that Carl Jr. is nine years older than Larry. Therefore, he must have been born in 1963 or 1964. It also states that Carl studied at the University of Michigan, like his father and like Larry would also do later on:

He also enjoyed helping Carl Jr. - who was nine years older - with his college computer homework when Carl came home from the University of Michigan during breaks.

Their father was a professor at the Michigan State University, which is a different university from the University of Michigan, and not in the same city, so by breaks they mean term breaks.

Chapter 2 also mentions that he was working in Silicon Valley by the time their father died in 1996:

Despite his grief [for the death of their father at the early age of 58], Larry remained enrolled at Stanford. It helped that his older brother, Carl Jr., lived and worked in Silicon Valley. They had each other, so Larry wasn't left to bear the loss alone, and the two spent time together, fondly recalling their dad and reflecting on their childhood memories.

In 1997, Carl co-founded the mailing list management website eGroups together with Scott Hassan, programmer of an early version of Google when he was a research assistant at Stanford University. Carl and Scott presumably met through Larry, but we don't have a source. The company was sold to Yahoo! in 2000. The Google Story Chapter 8. "A Trickle" mentions:

Google's deal with Yahoo!] had special significance for Larry Page, since his brother, Carl Jr., also was in serious negotiations with Yahoo! over a major business transaction. The following day, June 27, Yahoo announced plans to buy eGroups, a technology firm that Carl Page had co-founded, for $413 million.

Carl is listed as a co-founder in the SEC filing: www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1105102/0000950149-00-000584.txt as "Carl Page". He does not appear on the 5% stockholders however, poor Carl.

In 2006, he brought a company he founded called "Handheld Entertainment" public through a reverse merger with a shell company: archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/brother-of-google-co-founder-uses-shell-company-for-handheld-start-up/. "Handheld Entertainment" made an iPod competitor apparently. SEC filing: www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1309710/000095013606009480/file1.htm.

Wikidata entry: www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q15791098

September 27, 2023 marked Google's 25 th aniversary and the page cirosantilli.com/carl-victor-page-jr had a small surge of views according to Google Analytics. On that day, this page was one of the top Google search results for "Carl Victor Page, Jr."^[ref]. Wikipedia also had a large bump in searches for "Larry Page" on the same day: pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2023-09-11&end=2023-10-01&pages=Cat|Dog|Larry_Page which must be the root cause, Larry actually managed to beat "Cat" and "Dog" on that day.

She's truly passionate about health research and keeping healthy, almost obsessed by it. Also she's strong willed, and energetic. Good traits for founding 23andMe.

As www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/style/anne-wojcicki-23andme-genetics.html puts it well:

The Wojcickis grew into Silicon Valley royalty. It’s the sort of family, Anne jokes, where “you’re only a viable fetus once you have your Ph.D.

www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/parenting/motherhood-depression.html looks like the her from photos. Same as www.vox.com/first-person/2018/6/18/17464574/asian-chinese-community-mental-health-illness? Says Chinese descent.

Chinese descent: thesportsgrail.com/who-is-nicole-shanahan-wife-of-sergey-brin-google-co-founder-biography-age-first-husband-parents-chinese-mother-child-net-worth-instagram/ Good old Sergey likes Asians.

There is basically no information about them online, only some uncited sources such as: abtc.ng/chloe-wojin-all-what-you-need-to-know-about-sergey-brins-daughter/

Said to be the 5th Google employee, and Aileen Gu's father: gossipnextdoor.com/meet-ray-sidney-eileen-guus-alleged-dad/