[0:04]king louis xi
[0:13]This is Louis XIV. Also known as Louis the Great, Louis the Grand Monarch, and Louis the Sun King. Famous for supposedly declaring, But in 1685, even the self-declared direct representative of God on Earth, had questions he could not answer on his own. Questions about the ruling Qing Dynasty in China. How big is it? How many people live in the capital? What can they teach us about music, culture, astronomy? So, in the spring of that year, Louis sent members of France's Order of Royal Mathematicians on a voyage that would span three continents and three oceans. Their task: gather information that would satisfy the King's curiosity.
[1:12]It was a journey with numerous hardships and countless setbacks. But, five years, four months and two days later, Louis's answers finally arrived. And in the grandest of human traditions, he had become curious, asked a question, and learned a new piece of information. Just like billions of people who'd come before him, and billions who've come since. People who had access to cave walls, clay tablets, oracles, scrolls, books, the printing press, libraries, semaphore towers, telegraphs, the radio, the television, the Betamax tape, and the short-lived French National Internet system, called Minitel.
[2:08]Which brings us to today.
[2:14]Fishermen looking up when tomorrow's tide comes in, careful cooks wondering when anchovies expire, travelers trying to figure out how to say chapstick in Turkish, friends settling the bet about which team won the '92 NBA Eastern Conference Finals, chop seekers looking to make a move, and a fourth grader looking up facts about the Qing Dynasty for a history paper that's due tomorrow. Billions of King Louies asking trillions of questions in hundreds of languages, expecting someone to give them an answer in under one second.
[2:54]Now, who would sign up for a challenge like that?
[3:03]Interesting setup. This is Ben Gomes. Well, the correct pronunciation is Gomes. This is Ben Gommez. But I, I say Gomes, because I This is Ben Gommez. He knows a few things about search. Ah, that search. Anyway, he's kind of a big deal, even though he tried to convince you otherwise. Ben worked on search for more than 20 years, but that's not where his story started. So, I was born in Darussalam, in Tanzania, and uh, but I had a very early age my parents moved back to India to Bangalore. And there was a few books at home from my elder siblings, and that's the information I had access to, including I remember one torn encyclopedia that I think my grandfather had given my mom. So it was really out of date. In fifth grade, I got two presents, a bike, which my parents thought I'd be very excited about, and a much better encyclopedia, and I was actually much more excited about the encyclopedia, this is where geeks come from, uh, then the then the bicycle. Uh, and you know, my parents didn't know what to do with this.
[4:17]What I look back at how we found information, it was so dramatically different from today. When my mother was growing up, where there was not even access to a good library, you would have just accepted the fact that you didn't have the information and that's the way it was going to be. Uh, when I was growing up, for some kinds of information, there was a decent library, but you still had to take this bus that took about an hour, you had to look things up in a card catalog, that took time. Now today we measure in fractions of a second the time it takes for you to get information. I think that reduction in friction is absolutely dramatic because it can enable people around the world to have equal access to information. It's not just that people in some places, who have access to the best libraries, everybody should have access to the the highest quality information. So that combination of a deep technical problem, and I think a fundamental human need to understand the world around us, to know more about the world around us, is the heart of Google Search and what keeps me coming to work, still so excited 20 years later.
[5:27]So, in the early days, I wondered whether the company had the infrastructure to be a real company because, when I'd come for my interview actually, there was not even a sign indicating that this was Google. So I was not sure I'd come to the right place. But halfway up the staircase, there was a small neon sign that said Google. So that's when I knew.
[5:48]And it generally felt completely chaotic. Jeff was there, Jeff is also brilliant. Yeah, we were a very small company, we were maybe about 25 people. We were all kind of wedged into this second floor area, uh, in Downtown Palo Alto. I was in an office with Urs Hölzle. Urs was in charge of all of engineering, and at the time I don't think I knew how to pronounce his name. But he put the three of us name Ben in one office just so people could walk by and say, hey, Ben. Yes, we had the Ben Pen. I think it was pure coincidence, uh, actually. My first reaction to Google was I have no idea what search is, so it's probably not for me. But then I was intrigued by the problem. It was clear that there was some real value there, because without sort of really good ranking, all that growth of the web would be wasted if nobody could actually find the things that were there. So one of the core aspects of search is how do we rank results and how do we find the most relevant information. So a lot of people work on that. You'll get really good stuff from this from Pandu actually.
[7:02]I'm Pandu, Head of Search Ranking. His personal motto: No query left behind. Before working at Google, Pandu worked at an artificial intelligence lab at NASA. Yeah, we built an autonomous system that provided high-level control to a spacecraft called Deep Space 1. Really the most exciting thing that has ever happened in my life. In my professional life I guess. After doing that, he wanted a new challenge. I oversee the ranking team.
[7:37]So ranking is important because if we simply return the million pages that match your search query, that's not particularly helpful. And so we need to rank the pages that you might find useful, hopefully these are at the top of the results. We're really trying to bring information to the world at large and make it useful so people can improve their day-to-day lives. And I feel really lucky to have the opportunity to work on this mission.
[8:08]Let's go back a bit. Summer, 1999. Room 300 and something in the Gates Building at Stanford. And these two guys, Larry and Sergey, who are about to announce something so big, it merited matching polo shirts.
[8:41]And when it's all done, the coordinator of the launch meeting just changes a field in their spreadsheet. Changed it from blank to Yes. It's very momentous occasion. Yes. Search is not easy. That's for sure. We've been at it for 20 years and I think there's still a lot to be done. And so after a launch, you might imagine there's some great big celebration. More typically, uh, people stand around the, uh, the meeting room a little awkwardly for a few minutes and say, hey, good job. And then kind of they nervously shuffled back to their desks and try to catch up on on on life. Um, and probably that'll happen here. Maybe maybe we'll do something a little bit a little bit more in this case. This is a pretty remarkable project.
[9:35]I thought I wasn't feeling nervous, but when the moment came, it felt so good to to get that approval. Yeah.
[9:44]Um, it's pretty darn cool. Yes, after a launch, you might imagine there's some big celebration. More typically people stand around the meeting room a little awkwardly for a few minutes and say, hey, good job. And then they nervously shuffle back to their desks and try to catch up on on life.
