Inside the world of Google

How the company went from its humble beginnings in a garage to its heavy research and development presence here.

By MARION FISCHEL
Netanyahu with google ceos 370 (photo credit: Courtesy: Niv Kantor)
Netanyahu with google ceos 370
(photo credit: Courtesy: Niv Kantor)
‘Google likes Israel. Israel is important to Google,” says Paul Solomon, head of Communications and Public Affairs for Israel and Greece at Google, a company that has over 70 offices in 40 countries, and opened in Israel in 2005.
The British-born Solomon, who began working for what he calls “one of the most exciting companies in the world” in 2011, explains that Google Israel is “not about just translating products into Hebrew.”
There are three main categories to what it in fact is about, explains Solomon. The first is research and development – “Israel is the second in the world in R&D after Silicon Valley” – and analytics.
“This section is very important to Google,” says Solomon. With regard to the development of Google search, “the thinking and development is spread out all over the world, but the Tel Aviv and Haifa teams work on the main areas of research. Autocomplete, for example, was developed in Israel.”
Google Israel employs some 250 software engineers, 80 of whom work in Haifa and the rest in Tel Aviv, “on all sorts of analysis search queries and Google trends. They examine volumes of search queries over different periods of time in different places.”
The second category is advertising. “We work with advertisers, primarily in Israel, helping them use Google’s advertising products to build businesses. The amazing thing about the Internet is that you can reach global audiences wherever you are,” says Solomon.
Last, but far from least, under the broad heading of “other projects,” Google does all sorts of crazy things, because it really believes in the potential of the Internet, he says.
The field of cultural access and preservation began as kind of a “crazy idea,” he explains, “a thing Google calls 20-percent projects. This means that Google engineers can devote 20% of their time to any project they choose.
“Google started in a garage, and even though it is so big now, we enable employees. The idea is to help others. We want to make the web a better place. This is how Gmail was born. One day an engineer asked himself, ‘How can I improve email?’” In fact, the very first of the cultural-historical projects was thought up by engineer Eyal Fink and developed in his 20% time, as a result of his desire to be of assistance to Yad Vashem.
“Until the age of the Internet, historical archives were kept in dark, closed rooms and those in charge of them didn’t want to make them accessible.” Then Google got to them. “Now archive owners are doing a mental switch,” Solomon says.
“Google, globally, has taken on the idea of cultural presence and access,” he says. “The Nelson Mandela Archive and the South African Museum Archive have been taken over by the Google Cultural Institute in Paris.”
One of Google’s main projects is the Yad Vashem online photo and document archive with links, says Solomon. Another is an online partnership with the Israel Museum and the Antiquities Authority, in which Google has so far helped them make thousands of pieces of the Dead Sea Scrolls available online, including Genesis and the Ten Commandments.
“When we began the first project with the Israel Museum, they were getting a million physical visitors a year. Once the project was up, they got a million online visitors in the first four days. Logic would say that it is not good that they put their stuff online, but in fact it encourages more physical visits.”
Google’s vision is to make the world’s information accessible and available, says Solomon. “Pompeii is now on the Internet, thanks to Google.”
Another area Google is working on is that of increasing diversity, also fruit of the 20% project. Two female employees, both engineers, looked around one day, says Solomon, and realized that the men-towomen ratio at Google was highly unbalanced. They then developed the Mind the Gap project. The two engineers understood that to encourage women to study subjects that would then allow them to apply for jobs in hi-tech, they had to get to them while they were still in school.
“So they built an outreach project targeted at Jewish, Arab and Druse female students, which both visits high schools and encourages schools to bring their pupils to visit Google headquarters – all eight floors of it, in Tel Aviv’s Elektra Tower.”
Also under the diversity banner, a Kamatech Conference was held in the building in February, aimed at encouraging the integration of both men and women from the ultra-Orthodox population into the hi-tech labor market.
Google also has several projects underway with organizations in the Arab sector, “trying to make the hi-tech industry more diverse,” says Solomon.
December 2012 saw the launching of Campus Tel Aviv, a technology hub run by Google out of an entire floor at the Elektra Tower. It is, he says, “a space for start-ups, entrepreneurs and developers. They partner with us for their projects, and we help them.”
“Israel is indeed a ‘start-up nation,’ there are even more start-ups here per capita than in Silicon Valley.”
Campus has helped, among other things, in the development of applications for smartphones, says Solomon.
“Campus consists of a series of two-week programs with Google and other experts, VC [venture capital] funds and incubators that are already working with start-ups to help address the gaps, whether related to interface, marketing or business development.”
And then there is MEET, aimed at creating a common professional language for young Israeli and Palestinian leaders. In partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MEET offers advanced technological and leadership tools to facilitate education and empowerment for positive social change.
“Another project derives from a McKinsey search, which demonstrated that 50% of small businesses in the country have no online presence. Being online today is like having a telephone used to be. It’s like being on the high street. Almost everyone is connected here, with smartphones and so on,” he says. “Businesses in Israel grow online."
“So we partnered with the Economy and Trade Ministry, with the idigital Apple distributor and the Israel Postal Company and KAL, to build this project with the aim of getting 20,000 small businesses online with a free website, plus a free domain [for the first year] at AsakimOnline.co.il. So far we are up to 10,000,” says Solomon.
“Google is fortunate to be able to do all these crazy projects. Of course it is self-interest because we want the Internet to be better, culturally, historically. There is so much more to do, so much further to go. At present we are only using 5% of the potential of the Internet. The dream is to be able to give you what you want, when you want it.”
The latest advance is Google Street View, street-level imagery, launched recently in Israel.
As to working conditions for those employed in making the magic happen, “no one swipes a card at Google. It is not about time, but about getting the work done,” says Solomon.
“There is a lot of flexibility, especially with parents of both sexes. There is no issue about that, especially since we work in an online world. Everything is online. Everyone here works as part of global teams.
We have meetings online with colleagues all over Europe, we ‘hang out’ on Google Plus.”
Google tries to employ people from all areas – even art history graduates, says Solomon. “We get lots of new employees fresh out of university, or who have done one other thing. Obviously they need to be qualified for the job [in terms of computing skills]. We have people from army technology units, entrepreneurs who have done things and then come to Google, or even companies that have been bought by Google and the owners have come on board.”
As to the future? We hold it in our hands, says Solomon, and mobile phones are where it’s at. Today they have become portable offices, he says, and “you can do everything on your phone now. Videos, too, are a huge growth area.”
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