GOOGLE FACTS

· 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. In fact 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.



· Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked 'What’s up?' to which they replied "We are waiting for the rest of it". To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.




· One of the biggest leap in search usage came about when they introduced their much improved spell checker giving birth to the "Did you mean..." feature. This instantly doubled their traffic, but they had some interesting discussions on how best to place that information, as most people simply tuned that out. But they discovered the placement at the bottom of the results was the most effective area.

· 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.


· Orkut is very popular in Brazil. Orkut was the brainchild of a very intelligent Google engineer who was pretty much given free reign to run with it, without having to go through the normal Google UI procedures, hence the reason it doesn't look or feel like a Google application. They are looking at improving Orkut to cope with the loads it places on the system.


· Google makes changes small-and-often. They will sometimes trial a particular feature with a set of users from a given network subnet; for example Excite@Home users often get to see new features. They aren't told of this, just presented with the new UI and observed how they use it.


· Google has the largest network of translators in the world



· They use the 20% / 5% rules. If at least 20% of people use a feature, then it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular search preference before it will make it into the 'Advanced Preferences'.

· 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.


BLOOPERS

GOOGLE BOMBING:

A Google bomb or Googlewash is a certain attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Due to the way that Google's PageRank algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page all use consistent anchor text. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner. The results of searching for “Miserable failure” on Google. In one of the better known Google Bombings, the site was manipulated so that the first Miserable failure result links to George W. Bush's biography on the official White House web site. The very next entry reflects a similar situation with Michael Moore.

Earlier, the result for “go to hell” on Google gave the website of Microsoft as the first link. However, this has been rectified over years. But the resulting links for “Miserable failure” is proving to be a Miserable Failure to be rectified.


COMMA ROCKET BURST:

The first rocket launched by NASA burst during take-off. Do you know why? Because the developer missed a ‘comma’ in the COBOL program that was used to run the rocket !


INTERNET EXPLORER - A THREAT:

MICROSOFT has alerted users of ‘critical’ security flaws in Internet Explorer which could compromise the Windows operating system. The company flagged two new vulnerabilities affecting Internet Explorer versions 5.01, 5.5 and 6 – the most serious of which could enable an attacker to run arbitrary code on a user %u2019s system if it browsed a hostile website or opened a specially crafted HTML-based e-mail message. For example, an attacker could run programs on a computer used to view the attacker’s website, Microsoft said. The vulnerability affects computers that have Internet Explorer as their web browser to be affected by the issue.


WHEN WINDOWS HANGED….But probably the most remembered blooper took place during the official launch of Microsoft Windows 98. When the system was booted, first the windows logo was shown and as expectant faces looked up to the screen the system characteristically hung and then displayed the infamous blue screen of death. The operator quickly restarted the machine saving any more face loss for Bill Gates.