Geek trivia

[kranky]

At a convention I'm attending, Dave Girouard from Google Enterprise spoke at today's opening session.

He showed a screen shot of the original Google page from 1997. The letters were thicker, and it had a drop-down box letting you choose how many results you wanted to see per page. Other than that it looked pretty much the same as it does today.

Below the Google Search and I'm Feeling Lucky buttons , it said "© 1997 Stanford University"...

The trivia question is: why did they put the copyright notice on the page? He explained that including the copyright notice had nothing to do with any legal issue and it had nothing to do with Stanford.

Hint: it was related to something they learned while conducting user testing.

[edit: tried to make it clearer ]

 

[UlricT]

Google was these two guys Thesis work in stanford...

 

[kranky]

I guess I should have said it had nothing to do with Stanford. 😉

 

[dnuggett]

Originally posted by: UlricT
Google was these two guys Thesis work in stanford...

Original paper:

Thesis Paper

 

[Howard]

It made people feel more confident when using Google?

 

[kranky]

Well, you guys are no fun.

Anyway, when Google did usability testing of their home page without the copyright notice in a lab environment, the testers went to the Google home page, and then sat there doing nothing.

Asked why they were sitting there, the people said they were waiting for the page to finish loading. No one had seen a page so sparse of content.

They added the copyright notice so people would realize that's all there was, and the page was finished loading.

 

[Whitecloak]

Originally posted by: kranky
Well, you guys are no fun.

Anyway, when Google did usability testing of their home page without the copyright notice in a lab environment, the testers went to the Google home page, and then sat there doing nothing.

Asked why they were sitting there, the people said they were waiting for the page to finish loading. No one had seen a page so sparse of content.

They added the copyright notice so people would realize that's all there was, and the page was finished loading.

nice. :thumbsup: