Ideas Come From Everywhere

Ideas come from everywhere. A lot of people will say, well, how do you get the idea for Google Maps or the Google Toolbar? Where did it come from? And the answer is in an environment like Google. Ever since the company was small, even till now, when it's really large, we expect everyone to have ideas. Our engineers come up with ideas. Some things come top down, some ideas come from our users. And it's interesting because when you look at the myriad of different products Google's released, we actually have examples of almost all of the above. Google Maps, the idea for that actually came from an acquisition. We found these four engineers in Australia who were just amazingly good at building mapping interfaces and combined them with a bunch of JavaScript experts at Google and said, OK, let's take their ideas around how you navigate maps, place them on the web using JavaScript, and ultimately build this really great application. So ideas really do come from all kinds of different inspirations. There's other things that we do that are very strategic and top down. When we looked at, say, something like Google Desktop, we thought for a lot of strategic reasons, we need to have a deeper, more meaningful relationship with our users. What functionality could we provide them that they'll want to have on their computer and that will allow them to access Google really easily all the time? So sometimes it comes from an overall strategy or strategic concern, sometimes it comes from an acquisition that we're doing, and sometimes it just comes from someone wanting to solve a problem that they feel we could solve better. Google News is a great example of that. There was an engineer named Krishna Bharat, and he was a news junkie. And after September 11, he found himself really consumed with reading news. And he found he had the same pattern every day. He would go and Visit his favorite 15 news sites and he would try and find the same story about anthrax all throughout the different stories to get all the different perspectives and get the maximum amount of information. And after he did this for over a month, he thought, well, this is kind of silly because he's like, I work at a search engine and I actually could probably crawl all this data and I could also. He's actually an expert in artificial intelligence. He thought I could cluster things. So he built this little script that crawled his favorite 15 news sites, gathered up all the news, and then clustered it so it would actually group the stories he wanted to read together. And he built this little tool for himself to read news more efficiently, used it for a while, thought it was pretty useful, mailed it out to the company and said, hey, I use this to read my news. Maybe some of you would find it useful. And a bunch of us saw that and me and said, this isn't just an internal tool to help Krishna read news better. This is something that could help a lot of people read news better, and we should take it up to the next level. So it's not just a plain white page with lots of blue links, but actually looks more like a news experience and make it available to our users. So there's a myriad of different places that ideas come from, and what you really want to do is set up a system where people can feel like they can contribute to those ideas, and that the best ideas rise to the top in sort of a Darwinistic way, by proof of concept, a powerful prototype, by demonstrating that it's going to fill a really important user need, so on and so forth.