Google recruiters use Google to search for recruits for Google. And how do I know? I found out because of another Google product. The irony is that I’ve been at Google, and I will be at Google, so I’m not exactly who they’re looking for. So, all this, and the search was a failure, then?

Here’s what happened: I’m in the habit of checking my web server logs every once in a while to see which pages are popular, where my users are coming from, what keywords they type into search engines to find me, and sometimes just to stalk my stalkers. ;) For this, I use two great tools, StatCounter and Google Analytics. (StatCounter is the better of the two, by the way, but they have a last-500-visitor limit, so I need to check my stats at least daily.)

Today, the following entries appeared in my logs:
(inurl:resume or intitle:resume or inurl:cv or intitle:cv) (c or c++ or java) “computer science” “software engineer” (415 or 650 or 925 or 510 or 408 or 369 or 669 or 707 or 831 or 916 or 530) -jobs -job

The IP addresses show that the request came from Google’s Mountain View headquarters. The query shows exactly who they’re looking for. Interestingly, they seem to be hiring locally (the numbers in parentheses are all telephone area prefixes in the San Francisco Bay Area.)

There’s so much Google involved in this story, it’s scary.

It’s no secret that Google hosts an employee-only event every Friday where we get to talk to Larry, Sergey and Eric directly (though the contents of each TGIF session are confidential.) In June, I walked up to the mic and asked them why Google wasn’t the default search engine in Opera Mini, the #1 mobile browser. It used to be #1 at that time; today, perhaps Mobile Safari has taken over that spot.

Today, I heard that this has happened. Seems like a good thing that they actually take feedback from interns seriously, and/or maybe I’m taking too much credit. :) In any case, I’m happy, because the older Opera Mini didn’t even let you customize the home screen to pick a search engine. I hope that has changed too (user choice is good.)

(Note: Both snippets mentioned here are public news; nothing confidential was released in the making of this post.)

It’s been exactly a month since my feature launched on Google Books. I went on an ego-surfing trip to see who had covered it. Here’s what I found.

• TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/06/google-books-embed-book-clips-into-websites/
• CNet Australia: http://www.cnet.com.au/software/internet/0,239029524,339281859,00.htm
• Ajaxian: http://ajaxian.com/archives/google-book-search-now-with-clipping
  

  Very simple and clean.

  The words every designer loves to hear!

• TeleRead: http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=7066

  Fascinating, isn’t it, how summer interns’ work at Google can imperil whole businesses?

• Blogoscoped: http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2007-09-06-n55.html

• WebMetrics Guru: http://www.webmetricsguru.com/2007/09/google_books_and_the_search_fo.html

  Funny, but this one new feature of Google Books, I find, is one of the most impressive things that Google has done lately…but that’s just my opinion.

• VentureBeat: http://venturebeat.com/2007/09/06/google-offers-nice-refinements-on-book-search/

• Search Engine Land: http://searchengineland.com/070906-101120.php

• WebWare: http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9772831-2.html
• MobileRead.com: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13565
• Googlified: http://googlified.com/2007google-books-my-library-and-more/
• DownloadSquad: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/09/06/more-google-books-news/
• Switched.com http://www.switched.com/2007/09/07/how-to-embed-book-snippets-in-your-site/

This, covered at the Official Google Book Search Blog.

While it is easy to share links, photos, videos, and opinions on the Web, sharing books with your friends online used to be tough — and tougher even, to share individual clippings from a book. This summer, I worked with the Book Search team to add clip-sharing features to Google Book Search.

You can now highlight a section of text in any public domain book in Book Search, create a clip from it, and share it with the world. You can post your favorite clips to your blog along with a personal annotation, collect them in a Google Notebook, or share them with friends anywhere you decide to embed the link. Your clip looks exactly as it appears in the book, or if you prefer plain text, we have that too.

Also at the Official Google Blog, about collecting, sharing and discovering new books.

We’ve also launched a way to let users, select, copy and embed segments of public domain books (like the Newton quote) in any web page. We hope to make it as easy to blog and quote from a book as it is from any web page. Like many innovations at Google, a stellar summer intern worked on this.

Of course, no project is a single-person effort: Bill Schilit, my mentor; Nathan Naze, JavaScript God; Adam Mathes, Venu Vemula, and the rest of the Book Search team laid the foundation and were an integral part of this feature.

Everyone agrees meetings aren’t fun, but what if you’re discussing matters with your teammates while pedaling a 7-person bike furiously on the streets of Mountain View? Forget the discussing matters part, but the rest of it sure is a lot of fun.

Just don’t call it the party bike; it’s the “conference” bike. Google’s newest acquired toy is a 7-person bike, much like New York City’s Party Bike [link broken at the time of posting]. It can be scheduled as a conference room for holding meetings and as a team-building exercise (no pun intended).

Our team rode the bike to the nearby Shoreline Lake on a hot Friday afternoon. Just for kicks, we rode it up a hillock and let it go full speed downhill. Here’re some action shots!