Larry Page looked a bit tired and his voice was hoarse when he sat down with Charlie Rose at the 30th annual TED conference in Vancouver, Canada last Wednesday (March 19, 2014). The interview aired on March 21 covered good ground, and gave more than a glimpse into his thinking, and the future trajectory of Google.

SEARCH IS STILL NOT A DONE THING
According to Larry, computing is still very clunky. Computers still don’t know where you are, what you know, and what you’re doing. Search is very much a deep thing, and we are still in the early stages of it. According to him, Search is still not a done thing for Google. He considers voice as something very important in the journey to make computers understand us. Hence the recent acquisition by Google of the company DeepMind, which is into machine learning.
A video was played on stage, about a Kenyan villager finding solutions to everyday problems like a remedy for the diseased potatoes in his farm, and then helping his friends as well, using the search power of Google. The villager, Zack Matere from Soy, Kenya, is also a philosopher of sorts and had this gem to offer:
“The follow-up to information is knowledge
Once people have knowledge, they can find solutions without being helped out.
Information is powerful, but it's how we use it that will define us.”

HOW BALLOONS SOLVED THE ACCESS PROBLEM
Two-thirds of the world still doesn’t have access to reliable internet. And that’s a worry for Google, which cannot fulfill its stated mission to organize the world’s knowledge without everyone able to perform at least basic search on their computers.
When Google worked on a cost-efficient solution for this, one problem they encountered was providing cheap access points from up in the sky. The realization dawned that while it takes a lot of time to launch satellites, balloons can be launched very quickly. So it’s fairly easy to use balloons and create a worldwide mesh to provide internet coverage, Google decision-makers concluded, says Larry.
Maintaining the altitude of the balloons was a problem. But then Google being what it is, engineers there did some weather simulations which were never done before and found out that “if you control the altitude of the balloons which you can do by pumping air into them,
you can roughly control where they are”.
So now, Google is giving this project scale — launching balloons all over the world with the necessary equipment onboard, so that they serve the function of satellites and create a worldwide grid to solve the internet access problem.
The whole thought process behind this project stemmed from Larry’s research finding that someone had sent up a balloon 30-40 years ago which went around the earth multiple times. That set him thinking as to why balloons could not be used to create a global mesh, and Google is now on that journey.

THE ECONOMIC CONCEPT OF ADDITIONALITY
When Charlie Rose asked Larry to give him a sense of the philosophy of his mind, the Google co-founder was more than willing to share his thoughts.
Apparently, he is an adherent of the Economic philosophy of Additionality. What it means is that it's by doing things that you learn. The more you do things, the bigger is your impact.
By doing things that people think may not be possible, you can accomplish much, says Larry. The more you learn about technology, the more you learn what's possible. So Additionality means you make things happen by doing things.

CORPORATIONS CAN BE AGENTS OF CHANGE
A related theme to which Larry is committed is that corporations can be agents of change. The theme came into focus because Charlie Rose highlighted his contribution to Elon Musk to make the Mars journey possible. It was the unusualness of a charitable grant to a corporation which Rose highlighted.
According to Larry, most people think that companies are basically evil. But in technology we need revolutionary change, not incremental change. Commercialization in a way that makes revolutionary change possible, is very important, he said. Perhaps he may be hinting that commercialization of revolutionary change can only be done by corporations. 
In Larry's view, invention is not enough. Tesla invented electric power, but he struggled to get it out to people.  He was beaten by other people. Innovation and invention focus plus commercialization in a way that makes it possible is Larry’s mantra.
So there is nobility in what corporations are doing. He asks people to think why the company that you are working is worthy not just of your time, but your money as well. According to Larry, we don't have a concept of making philanthropic contributions to corporations. So his contribution to Musk’s mars venture should be seen as an attempt to inspire other people.

GOOGLE’S WORK ON TRANSPORTATION
Google’s research on driverless cars also came up during the interview. It seems this too was fueled by Larry’s long-term obsession with transportation systems, which started when he was at college in Michigan. Eighteen years ago, he first heard about people working on driverless cars. Now Google’s driverless cars are almost ready for commercial launch, having clocked 100,000 miles of fully-automated travel. Larry says 20 million people are injured in vehicle mishaps every year around the world. It’s also the leading cause of the deaths of people under 35. Let’s hope the driverless cars powered by Google’s software can make a drastic improvement to this appalling record.
The interview was also not without its intimate moments, when Larry referred to his illness repeatedly, first as a joke when he said he is in the elite company of people like Bill Gates and Edward Snowden who are incapable of delivering a TED Talk, and hence had to be interviewed. The reference to the condition again came up when he talked about Google’s ongoing work with regard to medical research, inspired no doubt, by his situation. As is well known, Larry Page's right and left vocal chords are paralyzed, which makes speaking difficult for him, and has affected his voice quality. The Business Insider website recently revealed the condition to be called Hashimoto's Thyroiditis.
e.o.m.

 Most people have a few hundred ‘friends’ in Social Networks like Facebook. For some, it stretches to thousands. But for the hindrance that Facebook caps the number of ‘friends’ anyone can have in individual profiles at 5,000, some are capable of adding ‘friends’ indefinitely. Just look at the Profile Pages of celebrities, some of which feature a few million fans.

THE LIMIT UNDER ASSAULT
All of this calls into question the received wisdom that the maximum number of relationships any individual can hope to have with others is about 150. It’s known as the Dunbar Number in honour of Robin Dunbar, the Evolutionary Psychologist who advanced the concept. He interest in the topic was kindled when he was studying social groupings among monkeys and apes, where he found a connection between the sizes of the individual neocortexes of the animals, and the size of their social group. He then extrapolated these findings to humans (we are their cousins after all), and based on the size of our neocortex, calculated that social relationships with more than 150 people at a time is not possible for humans. So 150 is the Dunbar Number.

At first blush, the Dunbar Number may look outdated in this day and age. And it appears that a case can be made about technological advancements effectively shattering all existing limitations in making friends, ‘friending’, to put it in Facebook parlance.

There are also others who caution about viewing the Dunbar Number as an absolute limit, and point out that a distinction should be made between people whom we directly know (which again is split into strong and weak ties), and those who are in our networks.

THREE DEGREES OF CONNECTIONS
LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman has tried to promote the terms First-, Second-, and Third-Degree connections through his book The Start-Up of You. The First-Degree consists of people whom we directly know, and the Second-Degree is made up of friends of friends, not all of whom we may know. Finally, there’s the Third-Degree, which is all about friends of friends of friends (whew), which really stretches the extent of people whom we can potentially leverage, without knowing them in person.

So what’s the conclusion on the Dunbar Number? Is it still relevant? A couple of years ago, the editors of The Economist magazine had the same doubt, and decided that the best place to clear it would be Facebook itself. So they knocked on the doors of Cameron Marlow, the resident Sociologist at Facebook, and asked him to crunch some numbers (‘Primates on Facebook, The Economist, Feb. 26, 2009’). Marlow found that the average number of ‘friends’ on the Facebook network is 120, which seems to agree with the Dunbar hypothesis. But since some people had very large networks the magazine concluded that the finding didn’t prove the Dunbar hypothesis. But again Marlow gave them one more interesting insight: the number of people with whom the average male on Facebook interacts is a lowly seven. Women do better, at 10! The interactions considered were comments in the Wall, photos, status updates, etc. When two-way interactions were considered (emails, chats, etc.), it was found that the average guy has time for only four people, while women were a little more generous, finding time for six!

Based on all this, The Economist editors seemed to be hinting that to use the word ‘friends’ to describe people in someone’s Social Network would be a bit rich. In their view, what’s now going up is merely the number of casual contacts that people track passively. “Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently, but they still have the same circles of intimacy as ever,” they concluded.

Now what’s your Dunbar Number?

e.o.m.

We’ve been paying so much attention to Google Search that our treatment of other search engines may not look evenhanded. Competition is good for everyone. At the moment, Bing, Google’s worthy competitor from the Microsoft stable, is lagging behind in market share, but please don’t tell anyone at Microsoft that Bing cannot compete with Google head to head.

Recently, when Satya Nadella took over the CEO of Microsoft some experienced SEO analysts did not forget to point out that Search veterans were now heading Google (Larry Page), Microsoft (Bing), as well as Yahoo (Marissa Meyer). It has not been lost on many that Nadella once headed the unit which oversaw Bing as well.

My money is on Microsoft to invest enough resources on the Bing team that they always remain a close competitor to Google in terms of the quality of the Search results, if not market share. Bing offers plenty of value-added free tools for the searcher, which are not limited to Keyword Research and Webmaster Tools.

Bing also powers Search for Yahoo!, and together with Yahoo!, offers the combined Yahoo!Bing network for PPC advertising on the web. Even the combination doesn’t come anywhere near Google on both organic Search as well as PPC Ads, but still they remain in play as a serious act in town.

DOES BING OFFER SUPERIOR SEARCH?
This brings us to the question: Are there any areas in which Bing offers a Search experience superior to that of Google?

In my limited experience, there are a few.

For instance, Bing offers conversion to bitcoin, though Google doesn’t.

Not sure how relevant it is, but given the popularity graph of bitcoin, I’m guessing Google may soon offer the service.

Versus

Anything else? Sure, I noticed that when you search for books, Bing offers a superior experience. For one, it’s possible in Bing to return a results page without the presence of Amazon.com.

I’ve not seen this happen in Google.

Also, I noticed that Bing always picks up the average reader rating of a book from Amazon.com and all other booksellers in the results page.

But I noticed that Google doesn’t pick up the average reader ratings from Amazon.com, though it may do so from other booksellers:

Are we done? Not yet. I was merely trying to highlight that there are some areas in which Bing Search results could be superior. Let’s continue our research some more in the next post.

e.o.m.

More nuggets from I’m Feeling Lucky to help us understand Sergey Brin better. Douglas’ experience with running the first set of banner ads for Google made him realize how much data driven the company’s founders were. Google had barter arrangements with Netscape and Go2Net. So the marketing department needed to come up with banner ads. “How many can you have by tomorrow?” Sergey asked. “Why don’t you start with a 100.” Douglas threw himself at the task, roping in a copy writer and an artist. All the banners were critiqued. The comments from the founders never seemed to end, until one fine day, Sergey again said: “We should try a bunch of these out. And see how they perform. We are wasting time by not running them and getting the ultimate feedback — clickthroughs.

Eventually the ads began to run, and Douglas says the pressure on him seemed to ease as he started the practise of plugging in data about which ads were attracting more CTRs into a spreadsheet, and hand-delivering them to Larry and Sergey. He would pull ads which were not working, and replace them with new banners. “I became a convert to the power of data persuasiveness,” Douglas writes.

Google is now justly famous for A/B testing its headlines and design. Its popular Google Analytics tool, offered free to website owners, even features a fairly extensive A/B testing function.

HOW A/B TESTING BEGAN AT GOOGLE
Wired magazine ran an article on the origins of A/B testing at Google some time ago. The rotation of banner ads narrated above by Douglas Edwards is of course not included in the history of the evolution of A/B testing at the search giant. This is what the Wired article said about it:
<<
At Google — whose rise as a Silicon Valley powerhouse has done more than anything else to spread the A/B gospel over the past decade — engineers ran their first A/B test on February 27, 2000. They had often wondered whether the number of results the search engine displayed per page, which then (as now) defaulted to 10, was optimal for users. So they ran an experiment. To 0.1 percent of the search engine’s traffic, they presented 20 results per page; another 0.1 percent saw 25 results, and another, 30.

Due to a technical glitch, the experiment was a disaster. The pages viewed by the experimental groups loaded significantly slower than the control groups, causing the relevant metrics to tank. But that in itself yielded a critical insight — tenths of a second could make or break user satisfaction in a precisely quantifiable way. Soon Google tweaked its response times and allowed real A/B testing to blossom. In 2011 the company ran more than 7,000 A/B tests on its search algorithm. Amazon.com, Netflix, and eBay are also A/B addicts, constantly testing potential site changes on live (and unsuspecting) users.
>>
‘DON’T INVOLVE EVERYONE; IT’S A WASTE OF TIME’
The UI team was debating names and designs for the browser button, a piece of code that allowed users to add Google search links to their browsers, writes Douglas. The mailing list had swelled to 10. Sergey found it ridiculous. Instead of exhaustive user testing and internal deliberations, Sergey said Google should just put up the service and test it when they get a chance. “Don’t forget. We can change it at the drop of a hat,” he said. ‘Launch first, iterate later’ was Sergey’s perspective. Then he expounded his philosophy. “I don’t think we should have any meetings about a project like this,” he said, “or any group emails except the one to users announcing the launch. Having everyone involved in every issue is not a good use of anyone’s time.”

 (To be continued. Vignettes taken from the book I’m Feeling Lucky by Douglas Edwards)