Lunch at the Googleplex

I recently had a chance to visit my buddy JJ over at the Googleplex. It really is quite an amazing place. Parking is a nightmare and there are just hordes of folks milling about. In the lobby they had this copy of Space Ship One hanging from the ceiling. I'm not sure why, maybe just because it's cool. It reminded me of a scene from Cryptonomicon where Chester has a fully reconstructed 747 hanging from his ceiling.

They also have a few cool data displays. The one you see here shows a live animation of the number of Google searches by geography. There are little blips that float up from the earth at a rate that is proportional to the number of queries per second Google is getting from a particular geography. We spun it around to Vietnam and the number of blips was pretty low compared with the firehose over the Bay Area. To be expected I suppose. Rumor has it Yahoo! is really the search leader in Vietnam. I have no hard data on this, it's just simply that most Vietnamese I meet have Yahoo email addresses and Yahoo 360 blogs.


Anyway, thanks for lunch big daddy Google. The shot of fresh wheat grass juice was particularly memorable.