Google TechTalk: An Evening With Urs Hölzle

After Vint Cerf in November I had the big pleasure to listen to another Vice President of Google at their office in Zurich. And this time it was a little special: Urs Hölzle, Swiss Citizen and long-time Google came for some sort of a Q&A session to Zurich.

I have tried to remember as many things as possible he said that night. In case I missed something, please report in the comments or sent me an email and I will expand the list. The list is in no particular order.

• Google (Schweiz) is now four years and 4 weeks old. They started on January 1st 2004 with one employee (wasn’t Urs ;-)). On the first month they have tripled (!!) to three employees. Since then they have doubled almost any year.
• For Google, Zurich is the biggest and most important engineering office in Europe. Google has around 800 engineers in Europe and 300 of them are working in Zurich. A high wage level was – as ironic as it sounds – a good think for Google to hire good staff.
• Google Zurich has around 350 employees right now. 50 of them work in pr, hr, sales, marketing … The rest is engineering.
• Google Inc. wants to slow down its growing in the US and Mountain View. Europe is a important market and they will grow stronger than in overseas. In 2006 Google grew almost 100%, 2007 almost 60%. This year they will grow less.
• Urs: “If you ask any engineer if they could need another engineer in their team they all will say ‘Yes, course'”. Google is really in need for more good people.
• Google teams consists of 3 to 5 members. They work together, even if they are in different time zones and countries.
• The environment is sometimes a little “chaotic”.
• One question was if Google really has an algorithm for all results or if the search contains many “hacks”. Urs expressed they have many “hacks”, mainly due to the next bullet point.
• Talking about The Long Tail: In a period of one month, around 66% of the queries are unique. This means, they have been searched only once.
• Wikia: Urs sees a future for human based search. The question only is, how will Wikia handle queries, only 10 people are looking for. They are a company and may only focus on “big keywords”.
• Every user deserves the best possible results. And for Google it is sometimes hard to understand what the user was looking for. Therefore they have many people and statisticians working and researching in that field.
• The search results are fully automated. Even if you would give Urs 1 million Dollars (or Swiss Francs) he cannot put your site on position two. There is no technical way to do so.
• The WEF will happen in 4 to 6 weeks. Yes, the World Engineer Forum 😉
• Urs’ mega trends are mobile devices and online advertisement. Online ads only make about 5% of the overall budget for advertisement. “If you compare that to the importance the Internet has in everybody’s daily life this number should be much higher”, has Urs said.
• GMail for Mobile are actually 170 70 different versions. Almost any mobile and any carrier needs a slightly different version. To solve this Google has started the Open Handset Alliance.
• Parts of the Google Cookie: unique_id, language, results per page (nobody changes that).
• Publishing will change in the future. You will be paying for “new news” and not for an archive.

Here is a little big about the brand new Google office in Zurich

• I wasn’t allowed to take any photos. Damn! But check out Richard T.’s photos.
• At the reception they have display that show the queries from around the world. Another screen flies around the world with Google Earth.
• They have fireman pole. And a slide. Directly to the restaurant.
• The restaurants are called “Milliway” (photo) and “Restaurant at the End of the Universe“.
• Conference rooms (photo 1, photo 2) are named after beers.
• Urs calls the Zurich office the coolest one ever. Even better than his place in Mountain View.