What was the killer use case of the web?
What was the killer use case of the web? Google. Google wasn't even imaginable until the web was already deeply underway. It was a thing that had to do with the specific novel dimension of the web,...
Topic: Google
200 mentions · 161 chunks · 90 episodes
0.4× distinctiveness vs baseline
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How much more common this term is here than in ordinary English. Higher values mean the topic is more characteristic of this corpus.
2.0x burst in 2026 Q2
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Peak quarter intensity across the topic's active span. Higher values mean attention was concentrated into a shorter stretch rather than spread evenly over time.
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- Google appears in 161 chunks across 90 episodes, from 2023-10-09 to 2026-08-03.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 3/25/24 (2024-03-25), with 4 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with google search, Gemini, and wild west, while by chunk count it sits between ChatGPT and Meta; its yearly rank moved from #1 in 2023 to #5 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
Using LLMs properly requires LLM-fu.
Using LLMs properly requires LLM-fu. Just like Google-fu back in the day. The kinds of people who had developed an intuition on how to formulate their query (sometimes in non-obvious ways!) to get great ...
If you give too many resources to a team, they'll extend themselves beyond the bounds of their ability without realizing it.
...ment, it's much harder to get out over your skis; the feedback loop is tighter. Googlers typically don't understand how to do anything in a scrappy, scarcity mindset given how resource-rich the environment is. The playbook I used to be ...
Sometimes overly-ambitious technical projects that fail still provide value indirectly.
...mple: Microsoft's Cairo in the 90's, which gave COM, Plug-and-Play, and others. Google Wave, which gave Operational Transform. Google Turquoise These kinds of high-profile failures are like a whale fall, a bonanza for scavengers. Lots o...
Cultural expectations in a company coevolve.
...thers. Social systems of norms are alive, and shockingly resilient. An example: Google's peer bonus program. It allowed any employee to give a $200 bonus to any other employee for just about any reason. There were a few limitations: No ...
Someone reminded me of some wisdom from the Google SRE book about satisficing vs maximizing.
Someone reminded me of some wisdom from the Google SRE book about satisficing vs maximizing. When there are metrics everyone defaults into assuming maximization of them, but for the majority of them, ...
With an early stage technology that has promising but uneven quality, you have to design the UI to be a good enough experience for the worst case, not an exceptional experience in the best case.
...struggles with the details, and has all the time in the world to help you." For Google Maps Augmented Reality Walking Navigation, we experimented with flowing particle streams where how diffuse the particles was was an indication of our...
In a former life I sketched out dozens of different possibilities for how over the course of decades society might end up with people wearing Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) out and about.
...ncluded everything I could think of ever working, including "Smartphone AR with Google Lens," "Snapchat World Filters", "Specialized limited-function Googles", and for completeness even "Direct Neural Links". Each idea had a ton of head...
LLMs are vulnerable to the "screenshot attack".
...t in the system. But it is not a given that it has to work this way! Consider a Google Search result where one of the ten blue links is clearly not a good result. It's not nearly as viral, Google isn't vouching for it as strongly. Going...
Why do people contribute to Wikipedia?
...ia? A similar dynamic: a few years ago I worked adjacent to User Street View on Google Maps. Users could upload panoramas they took, and in limited circumstances they'd show up in Google Maps. There was one example where a particularly ...
ChatGPT doesn't feel like formulating a query, it feels like talking to a human.
...hatGPT doesn't feel like formulating a query, it feels like talking to a human. Google is extremely impressive at figuring out how to interpret your query. It almost feels like it intelligently understands your query. But it doesn't! It...
I'm a strong believer in bottom-up innovation as the wellspring of a company's vitality.
... believer in bottom-up innovation as the wellspring of a company's vitality. At Google we called it 20% time. But I think a way to frame it that is more natural in other contexts is "120% time". These are not frivolous things you get to...
When I was on the PM hiring committee at Google, I was looking for the "two unteachable skills" in candidates:
When I was on the PM hiring committee at Google, I was looking for the "two unteachable skills" in candidates: 1) That the candidate saw that the world was not black and white and one dimensional, ...
It's easy to trick yourself when optimizing for metrics.
...elf when optimizing for metrics. A real world example, a second hand story from Google Maps. When viewing a place page, there's a button to get directions, with a big obvious icon. The text beneath the icon used to be how long it would ...
I was talking with Max Kirby about the idea of seeing AI as a new type of fiber woven through the quilt of the tecnium.
...e technology. When Max picked him up from the airport, Max navigated home using Google Maps on his phone. His friend looked at the phone and asked, "Is this AI?" Perhaps the answer isn't as straightforward as we think.
Coevolution drives massive increases in capability.
...aces you see this self-hoisting quality: Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) Google Search's quality coevolving with user's expectations. Dunbar's Social Brain hypothesis, where massive increases in intelligence were driven by each p...
This past weekend I was in Santa Fe for SFI's The Complexity of Civilization symposium.
...o, we'll be fine. Civilization will endure. Blaise Aguera y Arcas - VP of AI in Google Research This was the most mind-blowing talk for me. Intelligence is a prediction of the future based on the past. He built a simple self-bootstrappi...
A conversation I had a few years ago at Google with a VP who had joined from outside straight into the Office of the CEO.
A conversation I had a few years ago at Google with a VP who had joined from outside straight into the Office of the CEO. "Let me guess how you see Google. You were told that this was a place full...
Last week I learned about the "never scar on first cut" principle.
...of the whole requires some reduction of agency of the individual components. At Google, I saw how the perf-driven goal to "demonstrate a compelling vision that others are drawn to" (that is, a leadership frame that emphasized agency) en...
At Google, Search Quality was a center of excellence.
At Google, Search Quality was a center of excellence. We knew it was where the core of the value in the company came from. That team was known to be high perfo...