Mountain View's biggest advertising company went on a hiring binge, backed by what seemed like an unlimited money supply. Now, thousands of shoulda-been millionaires have only their salaries as compensation. A surprising majority of GOOG employees I know don't really like their jobs. Will they stick around for the…
Search engine marketing guru Danny Sullivan says small-time businesses are stealing other's listings in Google Maps. "Florists, locksmiths, payday loan companies and others have found their listings hijacked in this manner." It's a hack so obvious I'm surprised no one at Google thought of it: You can edit the listing…
Alex Payne, who manages Twitter's API, posted a thumbsucking essay on Tuesday titled The Internet's on Shaky Ground. Payne seems to have reverse-engineered blowhard New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's formula for a big-picture think piece: Take a self-contradictory slogan like "Worse Is Better." Lay out your case:…
"A space-age structure that could be the greenest office building of all time." "A living building that has no carbon footprint." That's the spin. So is this: Google spokespeople are telling reporters that plans are on hold. Charleston East, site of Google's planned superplex, used to be a parking lot for Mountain…
The rocket scientists at Google have a solution for our death-spiraling economy: emoticons in Gmail. The animated steaming pile of poo is especially classy.
There's a new party plane at Moffett Field. Not another boring Boeing — this one's a Dornier Alpha Jet, a German/French built fighter plane that seats two. The New York Times is updating its report faster than I can retype, so I'll skip NASA's phony backstory and cut to the facts: "It is not clear who exactly owns or…
So it turns out that Google's festivities on the Greek island of Rhodes were officially part of its European Sales Conference — but was it also the official company party? One commenter says no. One Google employee says yes:
This Sunday, Google turns 10. Grigoris, a tipster in Greece, estimates that between 3,000 and 4,000 Googlers have descended on the island of Rhodes for some kind of gathering. Among the activities: an attempt to set a Guinness world record in syrtaki, a traditional Greek dance also known as the "Zorba." Hard to…
"You asked if I was headed upstairs for a meeting and I said, "not exactly. I am here for GoogleApps." Oh, Pink Scarf Girl. We want to find your Missed Connections "Moment" Man, too. White, male, 20s, dressed casual? Who could that be? Just be sure to use protection with what you're grabbing "downstairs," too. The…
"We have a preference for those who like to work and play hard," the search giant candidly informs potential candidates for openings for a compliance manager, senior internal auditor, financial project analyst, senior internal controls auditor, management accountant, internal audit treasury manager, accounting…
Pointing out that in the last quarter Google walked away from a multibillion-dollar hotel project, closed two offices, and laid off 300 DoubleClick employees, Wired's Betsy Schiffman wonders if Google isn't cutting costs as result of a downturn in advertising revenue. Of course, the downturn has so far been limited…
Back in 2005, when I first made inquiries into the high-tech Japanese bidets now well-known to be installed around the Googleplex, the company was using the Toto Washlet S300. Now? The E200. What's the difference? $230 less in luxury, with the S300 selling for $749.99 at Faucet Depot and the E200 selling for a mere…
A tipster tries to convince us Google's cutting cost and clamping down on hiring:
Never mind that it rejected over a million other hopefuls last year: Google is really steamed that only 210 of its 300 work-visa hopefuls won the H-1B lottery. And Google lobbyist Pablo Chavez has also had it up to here with critics who say Google isn't doing enough for Americans and underprivileged U.S. students,…
Google's announcement today of a massive campus expansion was inevitable. Having taken over every last scrap of office park around it not occupied by neighbor Intuit, Google is expanding the Mountain View Googleplex to the west — and, more controversially, to the east, on land owned but poorly used by Nasa. Ignore…
Google finally announced details of its plans to build a new campus on property owned by Nasa at the space agency's Ames Research Center. The ongoing partnership with Nasa was first announced three years ago. The initial terms of the forty-year lease peg rent at $3.66 million a year, with adjustments to the rate…
Lots of Googlers are leaving Google. To find out why, Fortune magazine profiled Sean Knapp, who along with friends left Google to cofound Web video startup Ooyala, "leaving behind the perks, the 20 percent time, and a combined seven-figure pile of unvested options." But as Blogoscoped notes, the most revealing part…
Despite her protestations of innocence, it's pretty obvious that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg had a hand in getting top Google flack Elliot Schrage to follow her to her new employer. She's not alone. One Facebook insider recently observed that for every Googler hired at Facebook, they pull another four former…
Looking at the departure of top Google flack Elliot Schrage for Facebook and concluding that the search engine is suffering a "brain drain" is the laziest journalism on the subject I could imagine. The BBC's take on the subject is predictable, citing the same names — Ben Ling, Ethan Beard, even chef Josef Desimone —…
The chronicle of everything wrong with Google promises more sources and more dirt on the company. Probably best not to send tips via Gmail. [FuckedGoogle]
