http://web.archive.org/web/19980418143602/http://www-db.stan...
First dog
First chef
First non-engineering hire
First press release
First female engineer seems to be missing...
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-first-20-employees-wh...
Source: her wikipedia page, numerous articles.
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/98/12/20/2348230/good-new-se...
And surprisingly, the Google Timeline doesn't include him in there (though he should probably be listed around the 1998 time that Andy Bechtolsheim wrote his check...unless they both contributed to the same check?).
My guess is that David Cheriton, famous for keeping a low profile, didn't want it to be known that he was a billionaire through Google, and they honored that wish. But sometime fairly recently somebody else outed him (I recall reading an article a couple years ago that mentioned him as Silicon Valley's wealthiest unknown billionaire), and at that point the cat's outta the bag.
http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660 http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9411306
And it would be merely annoying if it only affected the interface language, but it changes features, search results and in this case the entire content.
Which makes it pretty much impossible to participate in this discussion in HN.
This is one of the reasons why by now I dislike Google as much as I disliked Microsoft back in 90's.
Some people may find it hard to identify with, but imagine communicating with someone you know speaks perfect English, who you have politely requested to communicate in English, and who actually speaks English to everyone else in the room except you.
There are less offensive ways to say "fuck you".
Google isn't alone in doing it either, Bing has slavishly copied this absolute idiotic stupidity although they aren't anywhere near as insulting about it as Google _yet_ (e.g. where Google, Wordpress, Youtube etc. show it in the language it geolocates you to rather than either your browser's language or your profile's language)
And all this with no language/region switch in sight? Except the one inside the account settings, which Google then randomly ignores?
What would you consider to be the appropriate reaction to such a user experience?
Or just imagine clicking on the link at the top of this threat and ending up on a page called "Onze geschiedenis tot in detail", which contains a truly awful, low quality and barely readable Dutch "translation" with no obvious way of accessing the content people are actually discussing here.
Would this put you in a good mood?
How about suing a new fucking search engine, DDG or Bing?!!! Do this for that, that for that and we'll need a college degree on Google searching. I travel so my searches used to automatically transfer to google.cctld. No thanks!
Just finished reading Steven Levy's book on Google - amazing read and insight into Google's history.
I was consulting it back in March 2013 for details I could use for my http://gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns so I know it goes at least that far back.
But you can also punch it into the Internet Archive (http://web.archive.org/web/20120401000000*/http://www.google...) and see that it goes back at least to March 2012. As it happens, as part of the previous research I know that a lot of Google content moves around various URLs without redirects, so between that and how the first IA version is comprehensive, I strongly suspected that it was much older than March 2012; one useful trick for finding the original URL is to look for quotes of the page on other websites which point at a different URL. In this case, if you quote the bit starting with "Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford...." (the first entry) and you search in Google with a date-limit of 1995-2010 (in the 'Search Tools' option), you can see hits dated from 2005, 2008, & 2009. The 2005 would be best, but it's some sort of spammy junk, so I try another hit, and it links to 'http://www.google.com/corporate/timeline/#start' which is quite different. That takes me back to August 2008: http://web.archive.org/web/20080401000000*/http://www.google... We can't search for this because it's broken but it tells us that we can narrow our timerange even more, to early 2008. Another hit includes a 'trackback' link to another Google URL, which I duly load up: http://web.archive.org/web/20020223143331/http://www.google.... Useless, since it's not the timeline - but notice the sidebar! 'Timline', bingo. Now we can go all the way back to December 2001: http://web.archive.org/web/20011213165211/http://www.google....
So, this page was started at least as early as December 2001.
It reminds me of one of my friend. He had to explain "How Google works" in the class. He accidentally read half of this prank:
http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html
and explained it in the class. Everyone enjoyed !
But the thing to be noticed most was that most of the students, including the reached believed ! !
Case in point, the Person Finder is mentioned twice on the Timeline, for the Tokyo Earthquake and the Boston Marathon bombings, but not for the event at which it was conceived -- Hurricane Katrina (correction at bottom) -- something that was arguably a more epic disaster than the bombings or earthquake, while at the same time being a much bigger and more surprising technical feat at the time...given that it was 2005, when Facebook and the social web had been barely a product.
- My bad, Google's actual adoption of Person Finder was during Haiti in 2010, which, well predates both Tokyo and Boston and was definitely a bigger disaster in terms of human life than both. But Haiti isn't mentioned in the Google timeline
https://support.google.com/personfinder/?hl=en
But the Tokyo earthquake and Boston bombings are more fresh in our mind, hence their greater prominence on a timeline generated from today's perspective.
(Not criticizing anything in particular about the OP, just pointing out that timelines can be just as obfuscating as they are clarifying, and the Person Finder example stuck out to me)
