How Did Google Get Its Start?

Published Mar 21, 2018, 8:50 PM

From Youtube to Nest, Maps to Android, it's hard to imagine life without Google. But how did the web giant really get its start? Will and Mango travel back to the mid-90s to see how a horrible campus tour, some extra Lego bricks and a week at Burning Man all contributed to the making of Google. Also, the weird reason Larry Page didn't sell the company for $1.6 million when he got the chance (spoiler: it wasn't because the offer was too low!).

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Guess what, Mango, What's so the other day I was thinking about our visit to the Google headquarters. You know, this was several years ago. You remember this. Oh yeah, that's when we tried to stump those employees, right, And so, listeners, Mango and I were invited to speak to the employees of Google after the release of one of our Mental Flaws books. This was around the time where it felt like everybody was talking about just how smart Google employees were, you know, all these tests that they had to take and everything they had to go through just to get hired. And so we thought we'd put them to the test, and we were sure we could stump them. We designed the world's geekiest crossword puzzle. So to explain what this was, we decided to not only create a really difficult cross word, but we decided to hire an expert in constructed languages and make all of the answers and constructed languages as well, like Elvish and cling On and Esperanto. And we were so cocky that we sent a message ahead of time saying that anyone who finished the puzzle would win a free subscription to Mental Flaws and a few gifts from our online store. Well, not only were there more than a dozen people who completed it, they were actually correct thing are grammatical mistakes. Yeah, it's pretty great. And as it turns out, that's not the only smart thing these people have done. They've also built this little company called Google. That's impressive. Yeah, and I guess it's pretty big now. And uh, you know, we were curious about how they managed to pull off this total dominance in the search engine world. So today's show is all about the origins of Google. Let's dive in. Hey their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend man guest Ticketer, and on the other side of the soundproof glass one of the half dozen people on the planet who still uses dog pods his search engine of preference. That's our friend and producer Tristan McNeil. I do respect him for this choice. I know you just want those search results just dog piled up, right. So I was thinking about search engines a little bit. When you were in high school, did your library have one of those like thick telephone books of websites? Totally? I remember that was so ridiculous. Like people actually thought that's how you search the web, Like that's how you'd find a great history site or whatever, and and you look up the page. But there's even a magazine called Yahoo Internet. It was the most magas told you about websites, like your websites you should go to. Yeah, even like Roger Ebert was a contributor. I love that magazine. Anyway, So I pulled some numbers for today's show, and according to Statista, Google's worldwide market share amongst search engines roses highs eighty nine percent last year. I know, so dominant. And I was thinking about it. It's really hard to name more than like five search engines five I know. Well, I mean you can get like Google bing Yahoo, asked Jeeves. That's still around, I think so. And then and then you're just like grasping right like or or you're in dead website territory like x it and Alta Vista. The one of choice for me as a high schooler was I think it was called web Crawler. Do you remember that one? Yeah, tipe and web Crawler. I'm sure one of the others bought it up. But anyway, well, for all the Googlers out there, and there must be a lot of you. Today's show is really for you. Now. In past episodes, we've delved into the histories of iconic companies like Amazon and Sears and Ikea, and so now we're doing the same for Google, because while it may be the world's most popular search engine and the second most valuable brand this side of Apple, that hasn't always been the case. So we want to take some time to explore the early days of the company, and you know, kind of trying to make sense of the business model that propelled this link fetching startup from this rented garage all the way to the five million square foot Google Plex it calls home today. That's right. But before we even get to the garage, we we need to talk about a dorm room at Stanford University because that's really where Google's story starts. So this is back and engineering major from the University of Michigan named Larry Page was just beginning his computer science PhD program at Stanford, and he was searching for a topic for his thesis and he kept coming back to the fairly new phenomena that was the Internet. As an engineer, Page was interested in the math behind it, and he actually recognized that each web page was a point on a graph, and that each link on a given page was a connection between the points and this underlying structure he gave the Worldwide Web it's form, and Page really wanted to understand it from the inside out. All right, but you know, kind of getting this group on the Internet's link structure seems pretty far off from actually building your own search And just so I'm curious, like, what's the line of thinking that leads from one to the other. So you've got to remember that Page was getting an early start on his thesis, so he still had plenty of time to find the final shape of his project. And one realization that pointed him in the right direction was that the Internet didn't provide a way to tell which websites were linking to a given page. So, for example, if you go on someone's tumbler page, right, you can follow links from one page to another, but you can't actually tell which sites link back to that person's tumbler. Is that true? I have to admit I don't really use tumbler, And so Page was annoyed. But yeah, so he thought it was important to know who was linked to who man, And while that might not be super interesting to most of us, it actually makes a lot of sense why it would be a concern for someone like him. I mean, think about how important publishing is among academics. For math and science scholars, especially, publishing research papers is a chief way to make a name for yourself, and the only thing that might get you more credibility is to be cited as an authority in someone else's paper. And that's because citations make up the backbone of academic papers. Like you're always citing previously published research as evidence to back up your points. So for the academic community, it's not just the original content that determines the paper's worth, it's also the citations in that paper and the number of future papers that later cited. So the links are kind of like a form of citations. As he's putting this idea together, that's right. So in page his mind, the whole Internet was more or less based on a citation system, except that, unlike an academic publishing nobody was keeping track of which pages were actually being cited by others. Okay, so that it's it's starting to make sense here. So in the academic world, if you saw that, you know, like a chemistry professor's paper had been sighted by a hundred other chemists, you could walk away from that being fairly confident that it was an important paper. And so what you're saying is Page wanted to find a way to apply that kind of ranking system to the Internet as a whole, exactly, and he figured that by counting up the back links associate with every web page on the Internet, you could actually determine the importance, or at least the relative popularity of each one. And with that goal in mind, project BackRub was born. You know, we've talked about this fact before that that it was called BackRub at first, But I don't think I actually know how they came up with that, do you do? You know why I was called that at first? I know, I initially I thought they just had like a closet full of masseuses. Actually it goes back to the idea of retrieving and quantifying back links. So that would explain the backpart. But but what about the rub I need I need to know the rub man go why the rub? Well, the program built for backroub was actually known as a web crawler, because you know, like you're saying, it crawls the whole Internet and he counts up links as it goes. So I guess Backroub just sounded better than back roll. I don't know. I mean they both found a little crazy to me, so I'm kind of glad they ended up changing names to it. But but maybe Larry Page doesn't bear the full blame for that, because he actually had a lot of help in bringing back rub to life. Right. Yeah, So the other co founders for gay Brin also got into the act around then too, and at the time he was a second year grad student at Stanford's Computer science department. He was ultimately the one who helped Page figure out how to make use of a rock count of links that Backgroub accumulated. So were these guys like old friends. I'm curious how did Brand get involved? I mean, did he just want to help out a friend, you know, trying to start this project or not? Really? In fact, for a while they were really antagonistic. And the two had first met in the summer of nine. This is when Page was visiting the Stanford campus as a prospect. Then Britain was the tour guide and he took him around and also showed him nearby San Francisco. But it didn't actually go that well. So Britain Page argued the entire time, really and they debated everything that came up during the tour, and and they weren't shy about their initial dislike for one another either. So there's this two thousand and five I've interview with Wired, and in it, Page says Serge is pretty social, he likes meeting people. I thought it was pretty obnoxious. He had really strong opinions about things, and I guess I did too. And Brian's own account kind of just shows that the whole feeling was mutual but maybe also not that serious. He said, quote, we both found each other obnoxious, but we say it a little bit jokingly. Obviously we spent a lot of time talking to each other, so there was something there and we kind of had a bantering thing going on. Oh man, that's pretty interesting. So they were fast for enemies. So after first impressions like that, like what made them want to work together? Well, pages projects sound amazing and this uh sort of made its way around campus and Brin was actually attracted to the challenge. He'd already bounced between a few different thesis topics of his own, but none of them seemed half as interesting in light of Backrupt And as Bryn put it, I talked to lots of research groups and this was the most exciting project because it tackled the web, which represents human knowledge, and because I liked Larry. So see, they truly liked each other, just like uh, Tommy Boy or Stepbrothers or any good buddy comedy. Just like that. I mean, they definitely had their work cut out for them, though, I mean crawling the whole web. There's actually this site I've never heard about until Gabe told us about it, but it's called Worldwide Web Size dot com and it gives a daily estimate of how big the Internet is. And today the Internet contains at least four point four nine billion pages, and these are the ones that we can see. So it's a ton of links to count. Yeah, But but to be fair, Backroub launched almost twenty five years ago and the Web was only made up of about ten million documents back then, which you know, don't get me wrong, there's still an insane amount of links between those pages. But you've got to remember Page and Britain weren't just trying to count all those links. They were actually looking for a way to rank the pages being linked to, But but ranked by what? Like earlier you mentioned ranking pages by importance, But what what makes one web page more important than another? Sure? So the pair's ranking system was designed to favorite links that came from important sources while downplaying those that didn't. So, for example, there are all kinds of different sites that link to Amazon, and some of those links might come from business partners like Whole Foods, but others just come from random people like I don't know, like a teenager who's sharing gift ideas on his blog. And from most people's point of view, the business partner would be the more important link. Right. That makes sense, But to an extent, it still feels like a pretty human centric judgment call on this. I mean, how would search engine know how to prioritize the company's business partners over just their customers. Well, it wouldn't unless you were able to translate that human measure of importance into a set of criteria could recognize. And this is really where page and Brand's biggest innovation comes in. It's this algorithm known as page rank, and yeah, it is actually named after page himself, and using this algorithm, BackRub was actually able to keep track of both the number of links into a particular site and the number of links into each of those linking sites. So, to go back to the Amazon example, like, imagine that only a few other sites linked to the teenagers blog in a friends, family, whatever. Since most of the sites that linked to his are likely personal as well, they probably don't have many sites linking to them either. But on the other hand, there are thousands of sites that linked to Whole Foods, and plenty of those sites also have thousands of sites linking to them, So page rank would recognize this distinction and deemed the Whole food site more important than the Teenagers site with respect to Amazon at least. All right, so it's importance by way of popularity. Then, you know, it's also not a perfect system, but it's definitely pretty ingenious the way they came up with this, And I'm also guessing it didn't take long for Page and Brand to realize these page rankings could make for a pretty incredible search engine. Yeah not at Also, they quickly found the backrupt delivered better results than you know, any other search engine out there, and because engines like Alta, Vista and exite. We're only pulling in ranking sites based on giving keywords. You could get linked to sites that really weren't that authoritative or useful. They didn't have that secret weapon of a link counting algorithm like page rank. But Page and Britain search engine wasn't just superior at the time. Its design meant that it would only get better and better the bigger the Internet grew, and as more pages and links were added to the web, the BackRub engine scaled accordingly and was made to become more accurate. I mean, it was a phenomenal design and it's actually from this infinite scalability that we get the name Google. The founders chose to play it as a word on Google, which is uh the term for the number one followed by a hundred zeros. I mean, honestly, anything is better than the name BackRub. So good choice there. But all right, so they have a name, they have a working engine, but you know, complexity aside. This is still a school project, right, like, it's not a business at this point. Yeah. So the first version of Google was actually released as a feature on the Stanford website in August of nineties, which by the way, was only one year after Page and Brand first met and, as we said, immediately hated each other. And wait, now that we've covered Google and how it got it start, let's talk a little bit about it that made the transition to you know, a proper company. Sure, but before we do, let's take a quick break. You're listening to part Time Genius and we're talking about how Google became the go to source for information on well just about everything. Okay, So, by the fall of ninety six, Larry Page and Serge Brand knew they had to hit on their hands, but they weren't sure if they were ready for all the responsibilities and headaches that come with starting and running a business. I mean, doing so would mean leaving Stanford early without graduating, and that was a tough pill to swallow given their academic backgrounds. Or they obviously went for it anyway. So so what caused them to change their minds? Ultimately They're big push came from Brian's college advisor, offering a bit of perspective. He said, uh, look, if this Google thing pans out, then great, If not, you can return to graduate school and finish your thesis. And that seems sensible enough to brin. So he said, yeah, okay, why not, I'll just give it a try. I love how nonchalant this whole thing was. Like, I know they can't know then what they know now, but just think, get this idea of like, okay, like ditch school and start a multibillion dollar tech company. You want to do it? Okay? I mean there actually was a little hesitation in there. Apparently they brought the idea to Excite and asked them to buy it for one point six million dollars one point six million, I know, And and there was actually a discussion they had it In the story I read, it was really more Larry Page trying to sell the idea. But he said he'd stay with Excite for like a few months, and then he wanted to return to school. But the CEO of Excite said BackRub was actually too effective and it would actually drive people off the site too quickly, like he wanted to slow it down to its speed, just to make sure that the customers stayed on the search engine and looked at display ads. And then like the talks broke down from there, and and weirdly, like while there's talk of conversation for page in those discussions, there's actually no mention of Britain, at least that's what business insiders reporting in the memos showed. That is so strange, all right, So they took their professor's advice. They moved out of the dorm room and the Google's first office you know, which, as we mentioned, was actually just a garage and the suburbs of I think was Menlo Park, California. You know. This is August of and shortly after that, the duo received an investment I think it was a hundred thousand dollars and this was from the co founder of Sun Microsystems. This was actually a pretty risky move. I mean, Google wasn't even incorporated as this legitimate company yet, so they were forking over a good bit of money for this unproven private enterprise just a couple of college dropouts. I mean, it's definitely not a safe bet. Yeah, So I read that their first investment check was actually made out to Google, Inc. Which, as you said, didn't exist yet. So Patroon Brent figured, hey, now might be a good time to incorporate, and so they did. Wow. Of course that investment paid off for everyone in the end. In fact, we talked about the garage that they rented that was from somebody named Susan W. Jicki And and she went on to become the marketing manager for Google, and I think she was their sixteenth employee. Well today she's the CEO of YouTube. That's awesome. And I know from our Amazon episode that all kinds of eccentric business practices and cost saving measures crop up during the garage based days of these giant companies. So like you remember the bell Amazon employees would ring whenever they made a sale, or those makeshift desks they called together from old doors. Did do you come across anything like that for Google? Oh definitely, I mean there's there's a bunch of examples. But you know how companies use these big server racks and cabinets to to keep you know, like they're all their computing power and everything. Well, the rat Google started with was built entirely from legos. This was actually a pretty smart move. You know, they were pretty cash strapped and it helped them expand along the way as long as they had some you know, extra bricks lying around. But actually the most famous bit of a reverence is probably the rotating assortment of those Google doodles that show up on the site's landing page. And believe it or not, they also got their start in Susan's garage. I didn't realize they went back that far. According to Public Radio International, they're well over four thousand different Google doodles today, but the very first one dates back to August thirty. N Now, all the stress from their impending in corporation was really starting to get to the guys, so before they even finished all the necessary pay or work, they decided to spend a week of the Nevada Desert at the annual burning Man Festival. Serious. Yeah, it's so funny because, like you'd think of it as a thing now where like over Norquist is going and all these c t O s I like have to show up. But this was twenty years ago. I know, it's pretty wild. So so they just had a vision for the doodle out and the fly off. Well, no, the first toodle actually came in the form of this out of office message that page and brand added to the company's homepage before they headed out to the desert. I guess they weren't planning to spend a lot of time in their computer at Burring man, but you know, appropriately enough. They decided to use that burning man logo just a little stick figure guy, and they placed it behind the second oh in Google, and the guys liked the idea of decorating the company logo as a way to mark notable events, and so much so. In fact, two years later, the founders asked one of their interns to drop up a doodle for Best Deal Day. I love that this was the next one that they decided. But the result was a hit, so Page and Brand requested more and then promoted the intern to the rank of chief Doodler. I feel like his parents must have been so proud. Well, I mean, I don't know how proud they were then, but they definitely should be now. So the guy's name is Dennis Wang, and I know when we visited Google, that was probably the most excited we got. We were like, dude that I think we even took a picture that was pretty awesome. Well, in addition to cranking out about fifty doodles per years since two thousand, he actually later became the company's international webmaster too. That's pretty amazing, And I do love how that seems to be a theme with these guys. Like the woman who read them her garage became one of their c e o s. And the guy who made the funny drawings was put in charge of all their international content. You know, it's pretty cool. And obviously they've won lots of awards for employee satisfaction. You know. It was funny when when we went out to the Google campus, which was you know, forever ago, it just seemed like such a dream place to work. Like they did your laundry, people had their dogs with them. There were these like free T shirt bins that everyone was so excited about, like rationally excited about. And I remember it was sunny and there were just people on the green with their tops working, but then they'd seven into like a set of volleyball that was going on. It was it was phenomenal to see, like I'd heard all these things about Google, but seeing it is completely different. Yeah. Well, since you're bringing up Google's more benevolent aspects, I mean, why don't we talk a little bit about the guiding philosophies that that that kind of took shape during those early years of the company. Because it was around this time that Google laid out both its mission statement and that mission statement is quote to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And then its official motto, which used to be don't be evil, right and and I mean the company kind of downplays that model more and more over time, not that I think they're pro evil now. Well, you know, for a good long while Google seemed to take the mantra pretty seriously, and it was actually a big part of the founders two thousand four letter when they were announcing that Google was going public. And those three little words. I mean that there's still the cornerstone of the company's code of conduct if you were to go look it up. So I am curious who actually came up with mono was a page or in uh, you know, it might not have been either one of them, although both of them took to it pretty quickly, and and the real origin of the phrases is still somewhat disputed, but the best guest credits the inspiration to Paul Bouchette, who was the engineer who created Gmail. Now, in his mind, the motto was quote a bit of a jab at a lot of other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, we're kind of exploiting the users to some extent, which is a little bit too be funny to hear, given what they do with everything. But you know, Google wanted to set itself apart, and most of the higher ups agreed the best way of doing so was just to not be evil, which is interesting because like, what does it really mean? I mean, it seems like, just like with that question of how to define the importance of a web page, there isn't actually like a single clear cut definition for evil. Yeah, it's true, but you know, if you look at some of the reports that that have come out about this, that there there was actually this interesting interview that Eric Schmidt did with Wait Wait, Don't tell Me, and I remember hearing him on the program that time, and he was blaming the motto and he said, the idea is that we don't quite know what evil is, but if we have a rule that says don't be evil, then the employees can say, I think that's evil. So now, when I showed up, I thought this was the stupidest rule ever, because there's no book about evil except maybe you know, the Bible or something. So what happens is I'm sitting in this meeting and we're having a debate about an advertising product, and one of the engineers pounds his fists on the table and says, that's evil, And then the whole conversation stops. Everyone goes into connections, and eventually we stopped the project. So it did work well. I mean, I do love that story. And I know we can get hung up on whether Google is always behaving ethically, but I also kind of like that it's just this looming guideline. Yeah, and I don't want to get too philosophical here, but we should talk a little bit more about what evil might be and and how Google actually makes its money. But first let's take a quick break. Okay, Well, so give it to me straight. How evil is Google? Like? Are they lex core people? Are are they more like that company from Alien that's like constantly getting its employees killed by Alien? So those are my two options there. I'm not so sure on that one. Now. Recently, there's been a bit of a love hate relationship between Google and the general public, and I think about all the half hearted jokes you hear about Google and them taking over the world, or the way we assume and kind of accept that the company is keeping tabs on what we do online and probably knows everything there is to know about us. You know, we we we did an episode I guess a couple of months ago about how much the Internet knows about us, and some of that was a little bit troubling, I have to admit. And you know, the truth is that folks are right to be somewhat wary of any company that gathers data on you and then uses it to turn a profit, right, which is something Google definitely does, but you know, it's not alone. Movie passes model is also based on this, and everyone's tracking our data now, and I do think those people are at least dimly aware that Google keeps track of where you are and what you use its services for and and then it uses that info to generate targeted ads. But what people might not know is that this kind of advertising is actually the most profitable part of the whole company. Yeah, and I feel like that's kind of an open secret, though, don't you. I mean, if you really stop to think about it, all of Google services don't cost anything. You've got the search engine and the web brows or the email service, all the various apps. But you know, the old saying goes, there's no such thing as a free lunch. And you know, in Google's case, the unspoken cost, I guess is our privacy. Yeah, but which is really weird to think about, because like then you can kind of make the case that we're actually the product that Google is selling to its real customers, which you know, from that point of view, all that handy free services that they offer are just really incentives to get us on board with being sold. Yeah. Well, why don't we talk a little bit about when Google got into the ad game, and I mean, I would have to think that was a huge turning point for the company. It was, Yeah, because for the first three years that are incorporated, Google really wasn't making much money, you know, despite having the best search engine in town. But that all changed in two thousand when Google launched AdWords. So this was the company's first venture beyond its search engine. It was an automated paper click ad auction platform, and with Google's ability to tailor the ads sold to specific users based on their search preferences, the company was able to corner the market and digital advertising for what's coming up on I guess two decades now plus you know, all that income in cash allowed Google to invest in new services like Gmail, Blogger, Google Maps, YouTube, and in turn, each of these services provided its own new stream of ad driven revenue. Well, it's obviously really smart. And you said the AdWords platform that works with all these services. I mean, that's where Google's profits really come from. So how much are we talking about? Exactly? So in two thousand seventeen, AdWords accounted for ninety five point four billion dollars of Google's total revenue that year, of their total revenue, which was what about a d billion? Good lord, I mean that's the difference of around fifteen billion dollars between those two. And we say a lot of things are insane on the show, but drawing basically a hundred billion dollars from advertising a loan, Yeah, that's insane. That counts more insane than cats, right, yeah, I guess, I mean I don't know. Well, so you know what else is crazy? Is that? Uh? That Eric Schmigay who quitted earlier, the CEO who thought don't be Evil was a stupid idea. He was a big supporter of Google going all in on ad driven revenue and pretty much all of Google's services, the ones we mentioned are are came about on his watch. So he stepped down from his exact role last December and favor of a more advisory role with the company. But after steering the ship for the last seventeen years, his fingerprints and business eat those are all over Google. Well, there's definitely a lot to talk about on the privacy front. But one of the other things that that many people might find a little bit troubling, and it's something that people have been talking about in terms of, you know, what the Internet knows about us for years now, is that by providing instant, unfettered act says to information about literally everything, the Internet is actually retraining our brains to act more like high speed data processors and less like tools for careful contemplation. And I mean, i'd say that's a valid concern for sure, but maybe it's not fair to pin something like that entirely on Google. Like everything in moderation, right, And if we take advantage of these services to the point that we impair our own thinking or decrease our attention spans, that's kind of on us, you know, sure, But to an extent, I mean, there's also reason to think that companies like Google and Facebook are are maybe exacerbating the problem on purpose. I actually came across this old Atlantic article from two thousand eight, and it pointed out just how much this brain reprogramming is really in the best interest of Google and all these other data farming companies. The author is Nicholas car and he writes, quote, the faster we surf across the web, the more links we click and pages we view, the more opportunities Google and other companies gained to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietor RUMs of the commercial Internet have a financial steak in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flip from link to link. The more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow concentrated thought. It's in their economic interest to drive us to distraction, That's what he said. But so Silicon Valley companies are going to say things like, you know, do no evil, or have these grand mission statements about bettering the world. It does only seem fair to hold the company's feet to the fire a little bit when it fails to live up to these kinds of statements. And you know, I'd say that encouraging that kind of thoughtless thinking if it makes any sense, you know, for the sake of profit, kind of qualifies as one of those cases. Well, I mean that that is very smart. And on that note, I want to mention this is a way to avoid bias. All of the research for today's program was conducted exclusively through bing. There's no ways true. It definitely wasn't true. That's not true. But you know what true every single fact in this fact. So let's get started, all right. We'll to put a bit of perspective around just how much traffic is driven by Google. Consider the fact that back in August of two thout, Google had a power outage for all of about five minutes. But during that time, everything from its search engine, to YouTube to Google Drive, we're all down. And during that five minute period, web traffic around the world plummeted. Bye. So earlier we talked about the whole constructed languages crossroad puzzle that we made. So do you know that you can actually select Swedish chef as a preferred language in Google? Did not? It's called work, work, work, and you can also choose cling on take Latin Pirate and Elmer Fud, among others. I'm really hoping our college friend John is not listening today's episode since he always liked to talk in a work work work, all right, Well, when we visited, I know, we were blown away by all the perks and the free food and everything else at Google, But you know, reading about some of the employee benefits is pretty interesting too. Apparently they have these unbelievable death benefits. I know that's kind of a funny phrase to say, but if an employee dies, their partner actually gets half of the deceased employee salary for a decade, and the kids of that employee get a thousand dollars a month until they're nineteen, or actually until twenty three if they're in school full time. And that's really stunning. So have you heard about this flying taxi startup that Larry Pages behind the company is called Kittie Hawk, and they recently had to reveal for this thing. It's an autonomous air taxi named Cora. Two people can actually ride in it. It takes off with these rotors that are on the wings, you know, like a helicopter, but then it just flies like a plane. So it doesn't really need a runway. They've been doing some secret test flights in New Zealand, where we like to do all our testing for our secret project. I don't want people to know that, and in fact that they've been working with the government there in New Zealand to get a whole fleet to these ready to release. So how far and and and how fast can these things go? They can apparently travel for a little over sixty miles at about a hundred ten miles per hour. They travel at about three thousand feet elevation, and I'll definitely be interested to see what happens with these. I might give it a little bit of time before I happened. I think I'm gonna give it more than a little bit of time. But it is really interesting alright. Well, on a lighter note, I always look forward to seeing what Google is up to on April Fool's Day. Their pranks are always pretty funny, you know, from the Google UK and Google Australia sites. Rick rolling every featured video back in two thousand and that's a real commitments giving us some serious ad revenue there to the Auto Awesome for Resumes project, where you could take a boring resume, and it would add emojis and animation, you know, to make it more exciting. I wonder if anybody used it and then submitted those resumes. But I think some of my favorites are the fake food and drink products they've launched, Like they had one called Google Gulp, which came in these delicious flavors like sugar free, radical and Beta charity and and it was quote designed to maximize your surfing efficiency by making you more intelligent and less thirsty. Then there was also the Google Fiber Bar, which they announced by saying, as we started thinking about fiber, we realized that there hadn't been real innovation in the world of fiber in a very long time. It's kind of a shame these things weren't real, I know. So I recently read a story that the details of the acquisition of YouTube were negotiated at a Denny's over a delicious safotazer of Mozzarelli's at it. Yeah, so the YouTube co founder, Stephen Chen said, quote, we didn't want to meet at offices, so we were like, where's the place none of us would go to. I'm guessing the one point six five billion dollar deal was probably the biggest deal ever negotiated at a Denny's. But you know what's weird. At that time that amount of money seemed huge. I mean, I guess it still sounds huge, but we're talking for YouTube. Yeah, that is kind of crazy. You would think it would have been sold for much much more. But you know, the only thing that would have made an even better fact would benefit deal had been negotiated over a plate of moons over my family, don't you think? Definitely? But the fact that you've successfully gotten meat or reference moons over my hammy, Mango, I think it means I've got to give you this fact offico congratulation. Thank you so much. Thank you guys for listening. If we've forgotten any great facts about Google or the Internet in general, we'd love to hear from you. As always, you can email us part time genius at how stuff works dot com or call us on our seven fact hot line one eight four four pt Genius Health. Can they reach us, Mango, Well, they can reach us through email, Twitter, all all sorts of ways. But there's one more fact I wanted to mention. Uh, today's Gabe's birthday. Oh, happy birthday, Game, Happy birthday Gave and if you want to send Gave a message, just put on our Facebook and we'll a forward it to him. Awesome. Well, thank you guys for listening. Thanks again for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of how stuff works and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Christa McNeil does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song and does the mixy mixy sound thing. Jerry Rowland does the exact producer thing. Gave Lousier is our lead researcher, with support from the Research Army including Austin Thompson, Nolan Brown and Lucas Adams and Eves Jeff Cook gets the show to your ears. Good job, Eves. If you like what you heard, we hope you'll subscribe, And if you really really like what you've heard, maybe you could leave a good review for us. Do we do? We forget Jason Jason who

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