ProjectNews: The Official eNewsletter of ProjectWorld & The World Congress for Business Analysts USA

Welcome to the January 2006 issue of ProjectNews. If you are receiving this newsletter, but have not yet subscribed to our complimentary newsletter, please click on the following link to subscribe: http://www.iirusa.com/optin

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PROJECT OF THE MONTH
January's Featured Project: The Creation of Google
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Project Goals
- To improve the quality of web search engines by producing much more satisfying search results
- To build systems that reasonable numbers of people can actually use, and to leverage the vast amount of usage data available from modern web systems
- To build an architecture that can support novel research abilities on large-scale web data

Key Players
- Lawrence Page, Ph.D candidate in Computer Science (Stanford University) at time of this project, co-founder of Google
- Sergey Brin, Ph.D candidate in Computer Science (Stanford University) at time of this project, co-founder of Google

Project Beginnings
- Google began as a research project in January 1996. Page and Brin created and tested it for their Ph.D. thesis at Stanford
- It was originally nicknamed BackRub because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance.
- The domain google.com was registered in September 1997.
- They formally incorporated their company, Google Inc., on September 7, 1998
- Google began with a staff of only 3 employees
- It was run out of a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California.
- In the beginning, Google answered most queries between 1 and 10 seconds

Project Challenges and Solutions
· No start-up capital
Received a $100, 000 from their first investor - Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder, SUN MICROSYSTEMS. Raised the remaining $900,000 of start-up capital by borrowing from friends and family
·Hardware/Storage efficiency
They needed an indexing system that could process hundreds of gigabytes of data efficiently and that quickly handled queries. They began by using a Sun Ultra II with dual 200 MHz processors, and 256MB of RAM, as the main machine for the original BackRub system. Intel donated 2 x 300 MHz Dual Pentium II, including 512MB of RAM, and 9 x 9 GB hard drives between the two which were used to run the main search. Most of Google was implemented in C or C++ for efficiency and could run in either Solaris or Linux.
·Creating a user-friendly functionality
While other search engines only associated the text of a link with the page the link was on, Google additionally associated it with the page the link indicated. Incorporating this "anchor text" often provided more accurate descriptions of web pages, helped search non-text items, and expanded the search coverage with fewer downloaded documents.
·Retrieving relevant search results
Incorporating anchor text also returned web pages to the user which had never before been crawled, and which many times did not even exist. So Google involved proximity and font information in generating its results and assigned each type of hit its own type-weight, so that titles and words in larger or bolder font were weighted higher than other words. Google also designed its ranking function so that no one factor could have too much influence.

Google Today
- In June 2004 Google was able to handle more than 300 queries per minute and able to scale from 150,000 to 15 million or more documents
- By 2004 Google was using approximately 60,000 Linux machines
- In 2005 Google had 4,989 employees and over $5 million in revenue

* Fun Google Fact *
Page and Brin chose to name their system Google because it was a common spelling of "googol," or 10 to the 100th power, and fit well with their goal of building very large-scale search engines.

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Joke of the Month

A Project Manager is the conductor of an orchestra in which every musician is in a different union.
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This Newsletter has been brought to you by ...

ProjectWorld & The World Congress for Business Analysts USA
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Join us November 6-9, 2006 at the Caribe Royale All-Suites Resort & Convention Center in Orlando, FL for the co-location of ProjectWorld and the World Congress for Business Analysts USA - the ONLY event in America to unite the project management professional with the business analyst, cross-industry.

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Interested in ProjectWorld? You'll also enjoy...
- The 11th annual PDMA/IIR Co-Sponsored Event, Strategic & Operational Portfolio Management. February 27-March 1, 2006 in Ft. Lauderdale, Fl. http://www.iirusa.com/portfolio
- The 7th annual IT Portfolio Management Event. April 3-5, 2006 in San Francisco, CA. http://www.iirusa.com/ppm
- The PMI Risk SIG and IIR Project Risk Symposium.  May 22-25 in Houston, TX.  www.iirusa.com/projectrisk