According to Alan Williamson’s blog Google’s founders did not know HTML When they started Google up. The question is have they learned to HTML yet?By looking at Google’s homepage the answer is probably no, just kidding!  

This came out of was the lecture last night where Google’s product manager, Marissa Mayer, spoke. As you can probably imagine the lecture was very well attended! This lecture took place at PARC and Marissa took the people attending though the lengths Google goes to create a good user experence. Some over facts which came out included:

• The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.
• Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker. (at least we have the status bar now, lol).
• The infamous “I feel lucky” is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button. (does Firefox use this?)
• Google makes changes small-and-often. They will sometimes trial a particular feature with a set of users from a given network subnet; for example Excite@Home users often get to see new features. They aren’t told of this, just presented with the new UI and observed how they use it. (cough, privacy)
• The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’. I thought it must be something like this where could they get that spelling from.
• Gmail was used internally for nearly 2years prior to launch to the public. They discovered there was approximately 6 types of email users, and Gmail has been designed to accommodate these 6.

These note’s were provide by the above blog thanks!

The reason everyone’s talking about Google BTW is that it just celebrated it’s 8th 7th birthday. Those 8 7 years felt so good….