The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 27 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Kaufer: Fake review farms target Google but explicitly exclude TripAdvisor
“We see these review places offering to write fake reviews on Google and some other sites. And then they say, except TripAdvisor. Cause like, yeah, if like, if they try, we catch them, we shut them down.”
Mullenweg accidentally invented an SEO spam technique using hidden CSS links
“And I unintentionally invented a new way to spam. I basically was able to use some code called CSS to have the code on the website, but if you visited it in a browser, it would be invisible. But if you visited as a bot, like Google, it would look like the word…”
OpenAI realized Google's Transformer architecture scaled far better than anyone appreciated
“Another company, OpenAI, latched onto the idea that this is, in fact, extremely scalable, more scalable than anybody had appreciated. And they just basically scaled it up and scaled it up and scaled it up.”
Google pivoted to full autonomy after test drivers slept at the wheel
“One was what we learned from people using the driver assist system. They would overtrust it. They, you know, would put on makeup and, you know, text and, you know, one guy actually fell asleep.”
Google de-indexed WordPress.org after discovering hidden CSS spam links
“Then Google came in, and of course, they were pretty mad that this code had outsmarted their search engine. So they actually removed WordPress from Google.”
Google and the Gates Foundation each granted Khan Academy $2 million in 2010
“And by fall of 2010, both the Google and the Gates Foundation each gave about two million dollars. So we had a four million dollar initial funding for that first two years to hire up a team, internationalize, and start scaling Khan Academy.”
Default backlinks in early WordPress installs boosted developers' search rankings
“Every install of WordPress had links to all the main developers. So because these thousands and thousands of websites were all linking to the word Matt, that would make Google think, oh, these websites, you know, Photomat.net, et cetera, is the number one site…”
Raz: Groupon's 2011 debut was the biggest internet IPO since Google
“You go public in November of 2011 and despite all of that, despite all of the negative press, it was the biggest internet IPO since Google in 2004.”
On search traffic doubled permanently after announcing Roger Federer partnership
“When Roger came on board and we announced it in New York, Search traffic doubled and stayed there.”
Blogger was Google's first acquisition involving employees rather than just IP
“We were literally the first acquisition that involved people. They had bought some IP, but we're the first group of employees to come in who were Googlers, but not.”
Von Ahn: Duolingo raised $45 million from Google's CapitalG
“And at some point we raised money from Google capital G is one of their investment arms. We raised money from them. It was, I believe it was forty-five million bucks that we raised from them.”
Luis von Ahn: Google Acquired ESP Game for Google Image Labeler
“And at some point, actually Google, in fact, bought it. They just bought the technology, and then it got implemented. They changed the name from the ESP game, which I call it the ESP game, because it's like ES, extrasensory perception. The idea was like, tried…”
Dolgov: Google gave self-driving team a 100,000-mile zero-intervention mandate
“The first one was to drive a 100,000 miles in autonomous mode. That was, you know, way more than orders of magnitude, more than, you know, what anybody has done at that time. And the second one, and, you know, actually that one turned out to be more interestin…”
Ferguson: Google's early self-driving car project incorporated ML first into behavior prediction
“When I got there, I actually worked on, on the prediction system. So this was trying to predict what other agents, other road users were going to do. And so this was some of the first machine learning that, that we incorporated into the self-driving car projec…”
Google has roughly 100 people on its Santa Barbara quantum computing team
“The fact that I can go talk to our quantum team in Santa Barbara, and there are a hundred people working on literally some of the most state of the art technology That humanity has ever worked on.”
Google uses AI to map African buildings for the UN
“We are mapping buildings in Africa, and these are hard to do, and we're using AI to really scale up the number of buildings we are mapping, and we are sharing the data with the World Bank and the United Nations to use for nonprofit purposes.”
A mid-2000s Google survey revealed WordPress powered 0.8% of the web
“Google had done this survey, published a survey of the internet. It was kind of like a statistical analysis of all the websites that were in the Google index and the code they used. And there was this part of the report that said, yeah, and then on .8% of webs…”
Marshall: Planet supplies satellite data to Google for Google Maps
“So we supply data to Google for their maps. They do huge numbers of requests to us.”
Marshall: Apple and Google's consumer electronics R&D far outpaced NASA's electronics budget
“But now, the billions and billions of dollars that would be going on in the consumer electronics industry, like Apple and Samsung and Google and all these companies, was far outpacing what NASA could spend on the development of electronics.”
Reffkin: Compass Co-Founder Ori Allon Sold Startups to Google and Twitter
“I had a friend named Ori Alone who had sold a company to Google and another company to Twitter”
Insurance keywords on Google cost upwards of $40 to $60 per click
“It's one of the most expensive AdWords that you can purchase on Google. The word insurance and insurance related terms can go upwards of 40, 50, 60 dollars a click.”
Sam Yam: AdMob Acquired Adworld One Month Before Google Acquired AdMob
“It was a company called AdMob, and then literally the month afterwards, we were acquired into Google.”
Google and the Gates Foundation granted $4M to Khan Academy in 2010
“And by fall of 2010, both the Google and the Gates Foundation each gave about two million dollars. So we had a four million dollar initial funding for that first two years to hire up a team, internationalize, and start scaling Khan Academy.”
Von Ahn: Early OCR failed on 30% of scanned book words
“Computers cannot, or at the time, could not recognize many of the words. About 30% of the words computers could not recognize.”
Google's early Blogger help docs explicitly recommended users host photos on Flickr
“Google had bought Blogger which was one of the early blogging programs, and they didn't have a way to host photos, so they put, you know, in their help materials online When people said, how do I upload photos? They said, use Flickr.”
Marshall: Planet founders shared a communal house with Apple, Google, and Stanford peers
“Yeah, no, actually, but it wasn't just NASA people. We had Students who are at Stanford, people that worked at Apple, people that worked at Google, all these places, and that created a fervor of intellectual dizziness that was always fun for us. So it was a mi…”