Marissa Mayer on the design behind Google (Keynote Video)

Marissa Mayer, who is the Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, gave a keynote at the Google I/O Developers Conference .  It gives some truly remarkable insight into the entire design process behind Google.  Some of the most compelling facts are listed below.

 

The first ever Google homepage from 1997.  

Some of the most interesting facts:

• The copyright notice at the bottom of the Google homepage is meant to provide an anchor, so people would not keep waiting for the site to load.
• Increasing the search results per page would decrease first page searches by 20 % because the page would load slower (latency, access to more servers etc.      
• In an early user survey some people asked "Is this a real company"
• By entering a search into Google it will direct your query to approx. 1000 servers and travel between various data centers at the speed of light.
• Reducing the size of Google maps by 30 %, leads to an increase in usage by 30 %.
• Because the feedback loop in search is so fast (A novice user learning the "technique" to enter the best possible query very quickly matures to be an expert), they aim at building a product for the expert user. Hence things that are too didactic, will not be put on the page.
• Start thinking 10 years out and then make a product roadmap for the next 6 months.  This technique helps you go in the "ultimate" direction faster without having to re-iterate.
• 1 % of the web is in Arabic vs. 50 % being English.
• “If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”-Henry Ford

"Marissa leads the company's product management efforts on search products – web search, images, news, books, products, maps, Google Earth, the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Health, Google Labs, and more. She joined Google in 1999 as Google's first female engineer and led the user interface and web server teams at that time. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google's search interface, internationalizing the site to more than 100 languages, defining Google News, Gmail, and Orkut, and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design."-Taken from the official Google exec. bio page.

Marissa Mayer on the design behind Google (Video).via

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