It's been a really busy and fun week! Started work at the Goog on Tuesday, and I'll be here as a software engineering intern this summer.

New hires had the initial orientation session on Tuesday - lots of paperwork, getting our badges, learning more about the company in general etc. During the rest of the week, we attended a number of talks, many of which were really interesting and informative. Most of the content was confidential though, so I can't really say anything more than that. For the same reason, I'll be blogging more about my general experience here during the next three months, rather than going into any specific details about my work.

On Thursday evening, they took us to the Texas Rangers vs. SF Giants baseball game at AT&T Park in San Fransisco. I had never been to a baseball game before, so it was an interesting experience. I've put up some pics that you can take a look at.


On Friday, I attended my first TGIF meeting, which is a weekly, company-wide gathering where executives (including Larry, Sergey and Eric) give us an update on all the latest happenings at Google. All Nooglers (short for "new Googlers") had to wear propeller-head hats and placards. It was quite amusing.


The work environment here is awesome. Everyone I've met and talked to has been friendly and helpful. There are internal tech talks all the time, so you can learn more about new technology and projects that other groups are working on. The perks are great. The food is excellent (yes, free breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday on campus, as you might have heard), and there's a huge variety in each of the cafeterias to cater to almost everyone's tastes. The micro-kitchens on each floor are stocked with snacks, about 20 different types of cereal, and a whole bunch of drinks, and you can go pick up anything you like, anytime. There are massage chairs, couches and bean-bags all over the place if you want to take a break and relax for a while. There's an on-site gym, volleyball courts, and free laundry machines to wash your clothes too. You just don't feel like ever leaving the place. ;)

I'm still in the process of exploring the campus and learning more, and I get the feeling the next three months here are going to be really cool. :)

A couple of days ago, I picked up a Canon PowerShot A430 at a local electronics store. I had been on the lookout for a nice digital camera during the last couple of weeks, and after considering the options, this one seemed to fit the requirements nicely.


As you can tell from the picture (taken with my T-Mobile MDA), it's quite small - about the size of my palm - so it should be convenient to carry around. I took some pictures yesterday in different lighting conditions and they all came out really well. There are a bunch of shooting modes like Color Accents, Color Swap etc. that add some spiffy effects to the pictures as they're taken. There's also a Super Macro mode for macro shots, and the pictures come out crystal clear. I still have to try out the video mode and some of the other features.

I'll probably end up taking lots of pictures while I'm here in the Bay area during the next three months. First day of work tomorrow. Totally looking forward to it. :)

So as expected, Google Spreadsheets launched this morning as a limited beta, and the web has been brimming with opinions about the new service ever since. One one side, you have the folks (including several news outlets) who think this the Excel-killer. On the other side, there are those who believe that there's simply no use for something like this when Microsoft Office and free alternatives like OpenOffice are already available.

I think labelling such an early version of the service a failure is a bit short-sighted. At the same time, calling it an Excel-killer is just plain silly. Instead, how about a different perspective? From an end-user's standpoint, I personally see Google Spreadsheets as a complementary service to desktop applications like Microsoft Office. Office is a solid, mature application suite that has virtually become the standard for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, among other things. It's going to be hard, if not impossible, for a brand new web app to achieve feature-parity with a desktop application that's been around for more than a decade.

At the same time, Google Spreadsheets gives users something that the standalone version of Office lacks - realtime, collaborative editing, and document sharing. Of course, that's what SharePoint is for, I hear some people say, but that's an additional investment over and above the cost of Office itself - you need to pay a monthly/yearly fee for a managed SharePoint hosting service, or you need to purchase a Windows Server 2003 license and set up your own SharePoint server.

The fact that Google Spreadsheets allows users to freely import and export to Excel means that it's actually adding value to Office rather than pulling existing users away from it. You could, for example, use Google's service to edit some files on a public computer connected to the internet anywhere in the world, save them, and download them when you're back at your desktop. Or you could collaboratively work on populating the data in a spreadsheet for a project with a group of friends, and then export your work to Excel if you need to create charts or pivot tables. If all you had was a standalone copy of Office, you'd have to email files back and forth, and merging contents would be messy, tedious and time-consuming. There are so many scenarios in which having a free, online collaborative editing service like Spreadsheets just makes life simpler.

Often, people's obsession with picking winners and losers makes them blind to the fact that two products or services from two different companies can sometimes work really well together. I think this is one perfect example where that's the case.

Google plans to make an online, collaborative spreadsheet application available to a limited number of users tomorrow, according to an article in the WSJ (registration required) and New York Times.

A "sneak peek" is up already, along with a first-come, first-served signup form. If you're interested, be sure to sign up soon! :)

Search engines are odd beasts, I tell you.

A few months ago, when I was trying to decide which search engine API to use for the search box on this site, I did a few tests and realized that MSN Search was probably the best choice for a site-specific search box at the time for a couple of reasons. About four months have gone by, so I decided to do a quick re-evaluation of the big three (Google, Yahoo!, MSN), and found that things have changed quite a bit since then. Read on.

First, I tried the good old "desktop search" and "ski-trip" queries again on the three search engines, and was pleased to find that the actual WDS review page comes up as the first result on all three of them now, as it should. Great! The "ski-trip" search gets more interesting though. Google does the best here, listing two of the three NYC ski-trip picture gallery links right on top, which is precisely what I would want people to see first (although having the third page in there too wouldn't hurt!). MSN is the runner-up this time, listing only the second page of the gallery at the top, which I thought was rather odd; listing the first page would have made more sense here. Yahoo! falls behind in this test, listing the first page of the gallery, but only as the very last search result.

The freshness tests had to obviously be changed this time. The last post about the shoutbox hasn't appeared in the results of any of the three search engines yet. Makes sense. So I tried looking for "gravatars" to see if the May 30th post shows up in any of the results. MSN and Yahoo! find nothing this time, while Google lists both the index and archive pages in its results. Excellent.

Like last time, I did some more varied tests on all three engines, and again found that the results were mostly consistent across the board. Google came out as the top dog this time, with MSN still doing better than Y! in most cases. I'll be observing the results and playing around some more during the next couple of days to decide whether I need to switch things around. Fortunately, all three search APIs are quite similar to each other, so pulling out MSN and plugging in Google or Y! shouldn't take much time and effort. :)