Google Presentation at USC

It’s 12:04. Time for a Midnight Message. Overview of the day. Awoke, had breakfast at EVK, took my last Econ Quiz, had lunch with Sam, went to Physics, went to Minors Workshop, went to Google presentation, and then went to Mark Study. Mostly a full day. What I’m going to write about in this post is the presentation given by Google.

So, three Google employees came to USC, armed with Google pens and t-shirts. One was a Berkeley graduate working in the Mountain View office; another was a USC graduate working in the Santa Monica office. The speaker was an older employee from Mountain View who comes to Southern California for two days out of every week.

The speaker was late, so the two other students answered questions. I should be more aggressive with asking questions. I had a few questions, but I refrained from asking because other people had questions too. So I tend to be a lot more passive than I probably should. I ended up not asking any questions during this time, opting to talk extensively with the speakers afterwards. Gersh was impressive, though.
The speaker from Google, Tim, gave us an overview of the company and the technology that Google uses, including a history lesson showing Google’s servers and how it has changed from 1997 to today. Whoa, that’s less than 10 years. Things change quickly on the web. I have to keep up. Supposedly, Google is continuing to grow at an accelerated pace. They are heavily recruiting interns from USC.

There’s some kind of host system in place in which a Google employee “hosts” an intern. They actually have to have a position open and then look through the resume database to find someone who fits the skillset they’re looking for. What skills should I learn? Ruby on Rails? Python? Maybe a professor or some other students at USC can help me do this?

One question I wanted to ask him was his thoughts on Google Web Accelerator. I’m currently using it, but it has major problems. I have 49.0 minutes saved, but the actual saved is much less because I use tabbed browsing to streamline all online activity. I guess it’s more of a measure of the time I save by using tabs over non-accelerated browsing. Google basically downloads the entire Internet. It’s no longer in the hands of the people.