Now one of the world’s most well-known brands, "Google" was an accident.  Last night I went to the BayCHI lecture at PARC
given by Marissa Mayer (Product Manager for Google). A very well
attended (standing room only session), Marissa took us through a
presentation geared around the user experience at Google and the
efforts/lengths they go to.

Some interesting facts came out:

1. The
   prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that
   the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact
   it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting
   the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.
2. Due
   to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted
   people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of
   nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied "We are waiting for the rest of it". To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.
3. One
   of the biggest leap in search usage came about when they introduced
   their much improved spell checker giving birth to the "Did you mean…"
   feature. This instantly doubled their traffic, but they had some
   interesting discussions on how best to place that information, as most
   people simply tuned that out. But they discovered the placement at the
   bottom of the results was the most effective area.
4. The infamous
   "I feel lucky" is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found
   that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users
   wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.
5. Orkut is very popular
   in Brazil. Orkut was the brainchild of a very intelligent Google
   engineer who was pretty much given free reign to run with it, without
   having to go through the normal Google UI procedures, hence the reason
   it doesn’t look or feel like a Google application. They are looking at
   improving Orkut to cope with the loads it places on the system.
6. Google
   makes changes small-and-often. They will sometimes trial a particular
   feature with a set of users from a given network subnet; for example
   Excite@Home users often get to see new features. They aren’t told of
   this, just presented with the new UI and observed how they use it.
7. Google has the largest network of translators in the world
8. They
   use the 20% / 5% rules. If at least 20% of people use a feature, then
   it will be included. At least 5% of people need to use a particular
   search preference before it will make it into the ‘Advanced
   Preferences’.
9. They have found in user testing, that a small
   number of people are very typical of the larger user base. They run
   labs continually and always monitoring how people use a page of results.
10. The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’
11. Gmail
    was used internally for nearly 2years prior to launch to the public.
    They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and
    Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.
12. They listen to feedback actively. Emailing Google isn’t emailing a blackhole.
13. Employees
    are encouraged to use 20% of their time working on their own projects.
    Google News, Orkut are both examples of projects that grew from this
    working model.
14. This wasn’t a technical talk so no information
    regarding any infrastructure was presented however they did note that
    they have a mantra of aiming to give back each page with in 500ms,
    rendered.
15. Quote: Give Users What They Want When They Want It
16. Quote: Integrate Sensibly

 Found here.

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