Friendship, Dust-Crawling, Toothpaste and Antifreeze – Great Gobs of Googler Genius

Photo – En Google.

A Googler is a person who works at Google (Nooglers are the New Google Employees, which these folks aren’t, necessarily.) Since Google is one of the companies that is shaping our world in a major way, I thought it would be cool to know what they are thinking, because I, my friend, am a Geek.

My 6 Picks for Most Fascinating Publications by Googlers
and Why You’ll Find Them Intriguing

This list is based on what is publicly available. I picked from that subset 6 papers that were the most accessible in language, and most applicable to our lives as surfers. I think you’ll like them because these publications:

• aren’t what I think of when someone brings up Google,
• have some bearing on our online work or offline personal lives, or,
• they contain some other endearing quirk.

So here we go.

#1- Why There’s Antifreeze in Your Toothpaste: The Chemistry of Household Ingredients, Simon Quellen Field, 2007, pp. 240.

Once dry and dressed, I was still curious, so I wrote a letter to the manufacturer, asking why salt was in my shampoo.

I received a surprisingly enlightening response from the company. Someone had actually discussed the issue with a chemist, and gave me an answer that made sense.

The ingredients in the shampoo come from many different manufacturers, in many different places around the world. From day to day, a particular batch of shampoo may differ significantly from the previous day in the amount of moisture brought in with those ingredients.

Salt has the effect of thickening the mixture, and is added to each batch in the amount needed to raise the viscosity to a specified level. The customer now gets a product that pours in the same way each time. This consistency is important to the customer, since getting a watery product causes suspicions about value, and about possible tampering.

Dude, that’s awesome.

Now tell me why High Fructose Corn Syrup is in 80% of the foods we’re eating, what it has to do with the alarming increase in obesity since its introduction and how to get it out of my diet.

#2- How Friendships Form, David Marmaros, Bruce Sacerdote, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 121 (2006).

It is frequently argued that friends and peers have a large influence on how we behave, how much education we obtain, what career we pursue, and even whom we marry. …

Families self select into certain neighborhoods and, students into certain schools because of the perceived peer effects as in Hoxby [2000b], Winston [1999] and many others. However, less has been written by on how we actually choose and are chosen by a specific group of friends within a neighborhood, school or workplace.

In the study they speculated upon whether frequency of emails was a factor of friendship, what role proximity plays in friendship and correlations between the race of a roommate and certain socio-political views. Also fascinating – how little had been written, at least at the time, about How we choose friends, and how much of a bearing friendship has on every other part of our lives.

True story: Every time I feel the quality of my life going in a direction I don’t like, I find at least 2 friends more successful than me in that area and hang around them more. My life changes predictably under these circumstances. We really do pick up the habits (good and bad) of the people around us.

#3- A social network caught in the Web, Lada A. Adamic, Orkut Buyukkokten, Eytan Adar, First Monday, vol. 8 (2003).

I’ve thought a lot about how online community behaviors reflect other online behaviors, and how some people act out online in ways that they don’t in real life, because they don’t see the internet or the interactions they have here as “real”.

What intrigued me here is that they were attempting to glean insight into the real world from an online community.

Our analysis was able to detect many expected trends (e.g. English majors liking to spend their free time reading or people sharing a narrow or unusual interest becoming friends), while at the same time finding non-obvious relationships (e.g. ‘responsible’ people being perceived as slightly less ‘cool’).

I love how cool is in quotes. So adorably geeky.

#4- Keeping the Web in Web 2.0: An HCI Approach to Designing Web Applications, Joshua D. Mittleman, Steffen Meschkat, 2007 (slides)

Photo – “the duckies invade Google”

I didn’t know the Web was falling out of Web 2.0 and I have to look up what an HCI approach is. Of my five picks, this was the most technical, flying over my head during some of the denser software-speak.

What drew me in is one of the stated objectives in the notes:

Systematic analysis of application state and its relationship to browser history and bookmarking.

To me, there’s a lot wrong with the theory of bookmarking, and RSS isn’t necessarily fixing it, just giving us better things to bookmark in a better bookmark engine, the RSS reader.

Then there was also this: “For every problem, there is a solution that is easy to understand, simple to implement, and wrong.” – it’s a paraphrase of a famous quote from H.L. Mencken, who I have long adored.

#5- Selective Disclosure [pdf], Ben Laurie, 2007.

I’m fully engaged when Google discusses issues of privacy, and this paper was in that section.

I value my privacy to the point of being paranoid about it. And yet I sometimes think that we in the US are going a little nuts about the issue. The title of this paper expresses best how I treat privacy issues online – I only share the most essential elements to getting what I want. If I wouldn’t want my mother, priest, child, public, to know about it, I don’t disclose it online.

At the same time, not all information I share online do I want shared with other entities – I want what I say in Facebook to be more private than what I write on my blog, but not as protected as say, my password. I also want to be able to manage and extract my information, and this issue often seems to lead to a self-imposed privacy problem… I could talk about this forever, so let’s move on.

It was this endless rabbit hole of possible ways Google could help, but also hurt, in dealing with the privacy issue that made these assertions by the author all the more absorbing :

I claim that for an identity management system to be both useful
and privacy preserving, there are three properties assertions must
be able to have. They must be:

• Verifiable

There’s often no point in making a statement unless the relying
party has some way of checking it is true. Note that this isn’t
always a requirement – I don’t have to prove my address is mine
to Amazon, because its up to me where my goods get delivered.
But I may have to prove I’m over 18 to get alcohol delivered…

• Minimal

This is the privacy preserving bit – I want to tell the relying
party the very least he needs to know. I shouldn’t have to
reveal my date of birth, just prove I’m over 18 somehow.

• Unlinkable
If the relying party or parties, or other actors in the system,
can, either on their own or in collusion, link together my various
assertions, then I’ve blown the minimality requirement out of
the water.

I love the researcher’s ideas on this.

However, I always wonder how Google would address the problem of them being the keeper of all this information. I don’t necessarily have a specific mistrust of Google. But in some distant day, the company could be under control of a different entity that doesn’t share my concerns.

Even if I decide to trust Google’s computers with my information now, what protects me against a breach or change in policy? The right to privacy isn’t in the constitution. It’s not like we have a legal basis for objection.

Again, could talk about this all day. Let’s move forward.

#6 – Do Not Crawl in the DUST: Different URLs with Similar Text, Ziv Bar-Yossef, Idit Keidar, Uri Schonfeld, WWW, 2007.

” The web is abundant with dust: Different URLs with Similar Text [17, 10, 20, 18]. For example, the URLs http://google.com/news and http://news.google.com return similar content. Adding a trailing slash or /index.html to either returns the same result. Many web
sites define links, redirections, or aliases, such as allowing the tilde symbol Ëœ to replace a string like /people. A single web server often has multiple DNS names, and any can be typed in the URL. “

Ironically this is the only paper of the selection that actually has to do with what Google is famous for, search. My reason for this can be summed up in one word – algorithms. I scanned dozens of documents by Googlers, that started out with clear, layperson introductions, and suddenly elevated into pages of algorithms that flew over my head.

I can read Math, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not my first language – and I figure it’s not yours either.

But this paper was not only in plain English, I felt that it best addressed why the duplicate content filter probably exists (it’s a filter, not a penalty – see Loren’s recent article about duplicate content).

Pages that have similar text aren’t necessarily adding value to the database, and take up resources that could be used for something else, in my opinion. There are times when finding this information is useful, like when you’re attempting to discover how many sites reproduced an article in the public domain, or as syndicated from the Associated Press.

But while this data should still Be in the index, and all the links where your site is referenced should carry some weight, there’s a good reason why dupe pages are dropped.

Anyway, I enjoyed it because it gave a good explanation of what results a database like Google would want to filter out, and after reading it, you can also extrapolate why, as well as how this could actually benefit you.

How I Put This List Together and How You Can Find More Googler Documents

You can find over 300 papers written by Google employees in an area of Google Research, called “Papers Written by Googlers“. You can also follow them via Atom feed, and see them classified by year.

Useful tidbit: If an author’s name is hyperlinked, it sends you to more information about that author, often including their home page, other papers, and papers written prior to working at Google.

That’s enough betrayal of my inner Googlphilia for one day. As I find more fun docs I’ll mention them periodically.