Page contains a good summary of their hardware to date. They seem to still be the centerpiece of silicon development. There are still however people outside of Israel doing it, e.g.: www.linkedin.com/in/laurasharpless/ says as of 2021:

2021: networking chip reports emerge: www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2021/3/30/22358633/amazon-reportedly-custom-network-switch-silicon-aws, presumably contesting with the likes of Cisco?

2018 onwards: Amazon AI accelerator silicon.

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:

The knowledge that light is polarized precedes the knowledge of the existence of the photon, see polarization of light for the classical point of view.

The polarization state and how it can be decomposed into different modes can be well visualized with the Poincaré sphere.

One key idea about photon polarization is that it carries angular momentum. Therefore, when an electron changes orbitals in the Schrödinger equation solution for the hydrogen atom, the angular momentum (as well as energy) change is carried out by the polarization of the photon!

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: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 factso 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.

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.