Be Like Google … Invest in R&D and Focus

Google Innovation … Employ the Best Engineers, Understanding Context, Invest in R&D and Focus

You might not like some of the things Google do or that they have a virtual monopoly in some markets, but their story of engineering excellence put them on the right track … employing the best engineers, understanding context, investing in R&D and focusing on the user.

While most people would point to Xerox PARC as the research lab where their parent company had no idea about the amazing technology they were sitting on. The potential of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) research facility at the Systems Research Center (SRC) in Palo Alto, California, was perhaps even greater. In fact, they worked on a mobile music player that could fit in your pocket many years before Apple worked on it.

The inventions in the lab included the first multi-threaded Unix system (Taos), the first user interface editor, and the networked window system (Trestle). When Compaq took over DEC in 1998, it was renamed the “Compaq Systems Research Center”, and, when, in 2002, when Hewlett-Packard took over Compaq, they relocated their research labs there.

They also created AltaVista, and which had the potential to become Google, but DEC just didn’t advance it. While Google went for minimal, AltaVista just became more blotted. In the late 1990s, the research lab lost so many great engineers to a young start-up … Google.

From its Stanford base, Google was initially based on the Page Ranking systems (named by Larry Page), and built on the method that based the quality of a paper on the number of citations. This was scaled to the Web by measuring the the number of links that led to a given page (“their citation count”).

But, Google, innovated fast. The greatest change in Google‘s approach to their search engine was in moving from Page Ranking to building’ a search engine on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work on understanding the context of words. This aimed to understand that the words “hot” and “dog” in the search were often related to eating, mustard and bread, and not in heating up canines.

Google also focused on understanding names (such as people and places) and their context. Their bigram approach allowed them to break sentences into tokens and then understand how commonly these tokens appear together. “Heart of Midlothian”, sees Midlothian linked to “Heart” with a high probability, and not to pumping blood.

As I remember, in the early years, it was sometimes embarrassing when you gave a demo in searching for things, and where an innocent search could bring up links to adult sites. And, so, Google focused on understanding bad words and filtering our adult content (unless the person really wanted it). Parents could thus know Google was fairly safe for its kids.

For the founders of Google, Sergey Brin was the culture-focused person for the company (“Don’t be evil”), and Larry Page was the great inventor. In the early stages of the company, VCs wanted a “proper CEO”, but rather than taking the standard CEO recruitment, they recruited Eric Schmidt — an engineer — and it was Eric who allowed Google to grow both the culture and with a strong engineering/R&D approach in the company.

Google thus advanced through research. The moral of the story … invest in R&D, but know how to take your R&D to market. Basically, Google recruited the best engineers that they could, and for just a few people, they took on mighty companies. They found that context provided them with the greatest lead on the market.