Blog: Google

On May 16th, Google hosted a consumer press event called "Searchology" where they announced a slew of search enhancements. Among these was a piece of my project, Timeline and Map Views. You can now also see the locations mentioned in your search results displayed on a map, or the dates from your search results organized into a timeline.

Here are some queries to get you started:

• gandhi timeline
  
• earthquakes timeline
  
• route 66 map (with &num=100 to show more results)
  
• new england bed and breakfasts map

Here is some blog coverage of this feature:

• A user tries many queries including attempting to find future dates
  
• A user discovers he can get library conferences in one place
  
• "Google's timeline and map views are nifty"
  
• A lawyer analyzes tort reform

This is one piece of a larger effort around "structured data" - identifying and understanding dates, locations, facts, numbers, and other information in Web pages. Some other pieces have already launched, like question answering on Google.com or dates from books (scroll down to the big map on the bottom). Other pieces will launch in weeks or months ahead.

But for me, this is the last launch I will personally participate in as a Google Product Manager. After five and a half years, I have decided to leave Google to pursue other projects. My first priority is reviving IPac, the political action committee I founded in 2004 to get Congressional and Presidential candidates on record on issues that are important to protecting innovation. You can read my message about that here. And I'll post more about my other projects - but that's a topic for a later post.

Matt and Ksusha starred as April's Guest Chefs, preparing the cuisine of Turkey. The fabulous salads and spreads were so delicious we just about filled up before the soup and main courses, not to mention the wonderful baklava for dessert (which was so good I forgot to photograph it). Matt picks up a cookbook from every country he visits, and his recent trip to Turkey to film a documentary was no exception.

Google, meanwhile, has installed a wall of storage bins full of LEGO bricks for engineers to play with. To kick off the creativity, Google commissioned a LEGO artist to build a LEGO Google logo. "Rather than build the logo out of standard rectangular LEGO bricks, Sean used the myriad of fun and crazy LEGO shapes that come in every standard LEGO kit... Wheels, doors, slopes, circles, hinges, trees, hats, coffee cups, fences, flags, and more." My favorite clever piece is a little LEGO person situated at the edge between the yellow 'o' and its orange shadow: his orange torso is firmly planted in orange territory, but he is leaning backward so his yellow head is over the line into yellow.

MyDD has become my favorite blog of late. While it's not the progressive blogosphere's most highly trafficked blog, it's the most intelligent about strategy and movement building.

Matt Stoller led the way earlier this year on discussing whether the blogs should take on Joe Lieberman, and ultimately deciding to do so; rallying support for Net Neutrality, and questioning some of the ultimately destructive anti-movement behavior of well meaning elected officials like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Chris Bowers has the best election forecasting analysis, particularly for the House races. And this past week he has launched two terrific, innovative campaigns. The first was Use It Or Lose It, pressuring Democratic House members in safe districts to donate more money to close races.

More recently, Chris launched a great idea to get the word out about terrible Republican candidates by getting progressive bloggers to link to revealing press articles about each of them, thus promoting high Google rankings (often known as "Google bombing") for those articles about candidates like Jon Kyl, Rick Renzi, J.D. Hayworth, John Doolittle, Richard Pombo, Brian Bilbray, Marilyn Musgrave, Doug Lamborn, Rick O'Donnell, Christopher Shays, Vernon Buchanan, Joe Negron, Clay Shaw, Bill Sali, Peter Roskam, Mark Kirk, Dennis Hastert, Chris Chocola, John Hostettler, Mike Whalen, Jim Ryun, Anne Northup, Geoff Davis, Michael Steele, Gil Gutknecht, Michele Bachmann, Jim Talent, Conrad Burns, Jon Porter, Charlie Bass, Mike Ferguson, Heather Wilson, Peter King, John Sweeney, Tom Reynolds, Randy Kuhl, Robin Hayes, Charles Taylor, Steve Chabot, Jean Schmidt, Deborah Pryce, Joy Padgett, Melissa Hart, Curt Weldon, Mike Fitzpatrick, Don Sherwood, Lincoln Chafee, Bob Corker, George Allen, Frank Wolf, Mike McGavick, and Dave Reichert.

Bowers will also (through BlogPac) buy Google AdWords on searches for the name of each candidate, parallelling the very successful campaign by the Drum Major Institute who purchased AdWords on each New York State legislator's name with the score he or she received on their Middle Class Report Card. I'm told that people from small upstate communities who haven't heard of DMI have often heard, and repeat, their legislator's score which they found out about through the AdWords campaign.

The first Screening Liberally event, an advance showing of Thank You For Smoking, was a phenomenal success with a line around the block and hundreds of eager theatergoers turned away. A few days later, the Tank produced its take on the Purim-St. Patrick's day coalescence with a comic reading of the Book of Esther and "Danny Boy" sung in Hebrew. And I spent a week in California for work, a team offsite to create mosaic tile picture frames, and opportunities to visit DL San Francisco and see a few old and new friends. Sadly, I caught a minor cold on the airplane - the second California trip in a row where this has happened.

Last week we launched a feature I've been working very hard on recently - Google Music Search. I wrote a blog post on the official Google Blog. Now, when you type in the name of a musical artist popular in the U.S., you'll see a special result, called a "OneBox," with information about that artist, a picture, some albums, and a link to a page with more information and lnks to buy the albums and songs.

Launching a piece of software is very anticlimactic. You work really hard, get all the production needs and PR and legal analyses and everything else together, and then if all goes well, the launch itself is just a matter of turning something on and watching out for any last bugs. People are using it and talking about it, but for those on the inside, all the excitement and work and energy is in the past. Until we start the next version.

A lot of the work we do to improve search goes unnoticed. Some of the best improvements simply make things a little easier. Maybe it's a ranking change, which leads to users getting better results, but no visible difference. Maybe it's a small UI change, like sitelinks, which register mostly at a subconscious level - people see them, and if I mention them they remember they were there, but they read them and click on them when they are appropriate without actually giving it conscious thought.

One UI designer at Google told me that when he launched a feature, a relative commented, "You did the design? That can't be hard - it looks just like Google!" But in truth, making it look just like Google, making it seem effortless - that's the hard part. It's the same with product management. If a Product Manager does his or her job right, then there aren't any crises, and it looks easy.

For many months anytime someone asks me what I've been working on, I can answer only with an enigmatic "it's secret." Many readers of this blog come from the link on the Google Blog, undoubtedly looking for some insight into the goings-on at Googleplex New York.

I can finally report that one of my five projects has launched a new feature. It's not enormous, but it's a very nice addition to the search experience on Google.com. Now, on certain queries where the first result is very strong, we add links to a few (usually four) pages within the site. This helps our users find the page they are looking for even faster and more efficiently, when the page they want isn't the site's home page.

You can see it on many queries, such as [eff], [daily kos], [boston], [hp],
and many others.

I didn't work on Google Maps. I wish I did, though, because it's surpassed Google Web search as my favorite Web site of all.

And I'm not the only one, just looking at the number of clever remixes people have created, like this display of Craigslist housing ads on a Google Maps interface. Or, for a different kind of cleverness, "What mere mortals see from the ground when people GoogleMap a spot nearby."

Update: this one of the view from ground level when someone makes a trip route with Googlemaps, by the same author, is even better.

Thursday, January 20 was an evening of many parties. While Bush was being coronated - I mean inaugurated - for his second term in Washington, New Yorkers celebrated in protest at the UnAugural Ball, featured on Air America Radio. The exposure also led to over 12 new Drinking Liberally chapters, and counting, in cities from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to Fort Collins, Colorado.

Thanks to Arielle Krebs for the great pictures of the UnAugural Ball, which I sadly wasn't able to attend - since at the same time, high in the Sierra Nevada, Google had rented out every hotel room in Squaw Valley for its annual ski trip. This year the company had grown so big we had to hold the party out in the parking lot, under five tents erected just for the occasion. Each tent had a different kind of music, with the main tent featuring 80s cover band and Tellme favorite Tainted Love, returning for the second year in a row. I joined a game of Mafia and successfully fooled the others as a Mafia member in my first game. The trip was definitely fun, though it's too bad we couldn't fit all the activities - dancing, talking, board games, poker, guitar playing and singing, and more - inside a single building, as we could last year. Next year, who knows?

At Google, we have a job called Google Fellow, for extremely talented, senior engineers. Google Fellow is equal in rank to a VP, with similar privileges and pay. But whereas a VP might have hundreds of people working for him, the Google Fellow has zero.

This reflects a reality in engineering: some good engineers want to be managers, but many don't ever want to stop coding. And a good organization will let the latter group keep coding since their contribution is tremendously valuable that way - while also enabling them to earn great levels of respect and be as well compensated as a manager.

Good tech companies have set up arrangements like this. But in most fields, some jobs bring the big bucks while other, equally valuable jobs don't. The always intelligent Mark Schmitt ties this insight to the recent calls to fire the consultants who earn huge commissions while providing little value to losing Democratic candidates. In her article, Amy Sullivan points out that most of these not-so-useful consultants start out as very talented campaign operatives. But the money working as field director or opposition researcher for one campaign is meager, while a big-time consultant for many campaigns rakes it in. As Schmitt suggests, this is the real problem we need to fix.

"The mixed-up incentives that pull people away from their strengths and toward the anomalous big-money zones is part of the problem, I think. Campaigns should certainly try to cut the ridiculous percentage that goes to media buyers, as the Bush campaign did, but some of them should also take the lead in figuring out how to pay some of the other indispensables a little more and give them more sustainable careers."

Campaign consultants aren't the only place a lack of a career path threatens success. We don't effectively nurture promising writers, future TV talking heads, or other non-campaign parts of a successful party. And outside engineering, this problem is just as common in business. Many extremely talented people push themselves to go into management, whether they are talented at it or not - hence the Peter Principle. In nearly any field, it would behoove organizations to find ways to make management not the natural direction of everyone's career, but simply one of several available tracks any of which lead to personal and financial success.