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 33 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
Smith: Google tracks post-click dwell time via Chrome and Android for ranking
“Google's tracking everyone through Chrome and Android, and they can actually see what happened after they left Google. And ultimately Google wants you to end your session or find the answer, find what you wanted on that page. So the more you click on, on our U…”
Smith: Google VP confirmed publisher referral traffic is up slightly
“Google published something recently. Their VP of search explicitly said, I looked at our, the traffic that we're sending to publishers and it is not down. It's up slightly. So it is not true that Google search is going down.”
The Google Hangouts team invented WebRTC, which now powers global communications
“We, the Hangouts team invented WebRTC. Right now, every single communication in the world happens on WebRTC.”
Ries: Google settled two lawsuits over violating 'Don't be evil'
“Google has been sued twice now for breaking the don't be evil pledge and they've had to settle both lawsuits.”
Smith: Top LLM answers are determined by citation frequency, not ranking
“Usually when you ask something like what's the best tool for X, the first answer will be mentioned at the most in the citations. So that's very different from Google.”
Rachitsky: More YC founders come from Palantir than from Google
“And when you look at YC founders and they're where they've come from, I think you may be shared in this in your post that there's more YC ex-Palantir founders than there are ex-Google founders in spite of Google being something like 50 times bigger sample size…”
Godin: Yahoo had the opportunity to acquire Google for $10M
“At the time, I was at Yahoo. Yahoo had the chance to buy Google for ten million dollars while I was there.”
Schwartz: Google Is Legally Prohibited From Providing Exact Ad Search Volumes
“So even Google for, again, for past monopolistic reasons, Google's not allowed to give the real number that they see on Google ads for how many people search it. They have to buy it from another data source and then give that out.”
Schwartz: DOJ Antitrust Ruling Confirms Google Holds 98% Mobile Search Share
“And in the verdict, it says that Google has 98% of mobile searches.”
Schillace: Google Docs won market share, but Microsoft kept the money
“In retrospect, they did fine. Like, we took a bunch of market share, but they kept all the money, basically. So, you know, we being Google, like, you know, so, like, they survived it. Like, you know, they survived. They did a good job surviving the challenge. …”
Stein: Google launched Search Live conversational voice out of Labs
“Funny enough, we actually just launched search live actually out of labs this week. And so you can talk to search in a live AI setting, which is conversational voice, voice on when you're driving, you can just talk all the knowledge I talked about, what you ca…”
Stein: Google AI executes query fan-out with dozens of background searches
“When our AI constructs a response it's actually trying to, it does something called query fan out. Where the model uses Google search as a tool to find, to do other querying. So maybe you're asking about specific shoes. It'll add and append all of these other …”
Levine: Microsoft invested in Waze due to lacking proprietary navigation maps
“Microsoft decided that, wait a minute, we don't have our own maps, so let's invest in Waze. So we ended up getting investment from someone that we did not expect.”
Rachitsky: Major tech companies hire product managers, not product owners
“Google has no product owners as far as they know. Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, like no company you, you've heard of that's a tech company has a product owner. They have, or they're all product managers. They're all product managers.”
Schwartz: Google Evaluates AI-Generated Content on Usefulness Rather Than Provenance
“And in their documentation, they say that AI itself is not the problem. It's the helpfulness, the usefulness of the content that would be a problem.”
Schwartz: 63% of Gen Z uses TikTok for search
“So in the Google verdict, I think Google's said this before, 63% of Gen Z uses TikTok to search.”
Bosworth: Meta's FAIR is the second most-cited AI research lab after Google
“People don't notice that FAIR, our AI research lab is are the second most cited research lab in AI behind Google.”
Schillace: Google treated candidate controversy and single interview vetoes as positive signals
“I interviewed Dave Bezris. I interviewed him when he came in and I asked him that question and his response was, I don't do math next question. And so I failed him. I was the veto and they have this policy where we're friends now, like, They have this policy w…”
Google segregated the Google+ team in a restricted, keycard-access-only building
“Google had done a lot of things at the time that, that, that were the first for them. I don't know if they've done them since, but things like everyone worked in Google plus was sent to a different building that building a different key card. If you didn't wor…”
Egner: VaccinateCA provided the COVID-19 vaccine location data for Google Maps
“And we built an API. We were working directly with Google, and if you ever looked up, like, vaccine locations on Google Maps, that was us feeding that to them, which was really cool.”
Changuel: Google Chrome Is Working on Native Coupon and Cashback Autofill
“And I know Chrome is working on it, so it's coming if you're a Chrome user.”
Changuel: Google Has Dedicated Delight Product Teams for Chrome and Meet
“During my time at Google, I've been the delight PM. So there is even an entire product team who actually work on making sure that the product is delightful. I mean, we do have such a thing for Chrome. We have that for Google Meet. I mean, that's a real thing.”
Smith: Chat prompts average 25 words versus six words on Google
“So the average number of words, I think perplexity said this, or somebody else said it was around 25 words versus Google words, around six words.”
Knapp: A one-week Stockholm browser prototype became Google Meet
“And in that week in Stockholm, we created a prototype instead. We decided, you know what, forget it. We're just going to build something and put it in people's hands, put it in our fellow Googlers hands. And that Prototype was what became Google Meet. It was t…”
Davis: Competitors cannot legally use trademarked brand names in Google ad copy
“If the brand is trademarked within Google, they cannot use your name within the ad copy. Google more times than not will disallow it, but they could misspell it.”
Duggal: Display advertising remains Google's second-largest business
“And then in the end we ended up building what is even still today, I believe Google's large, second largest business, which is the display advertising business.”
Rachitsky: Leading US tech and enterprise CEOs were born in India
“Today the CEOs of Microsoft, Alphabet, Adobe, which is a two hundred fifty billion dollar company, turns out, IBM, which is a hundred seventy billion dollar company, Palo Alto Networks, which is a hundred billion dollar company, even Starbucks, also a hundred …”
Schillace: Writely originally ran on C# on three rented Windows servers
“We started off, in, in C Sharp, which is little known, in, you know, our own, there's, like, pre-cloud, so we, like, had three file servers that we rented that were Windows machines in a data center in Texas with a sysadmin in the Philippines running them. So …”
Shackleton: Google previously required a CS degree for PM transitions
“I probably worked for at least four or five years before being able to move to PM. And that was, I think that was like a slightly harrowing journey because at the time you had to have a computer science degree.”
Gilad: Gmail's tabbed inbox was first tested via an HTML facade
“We used a lot of those in the tabbed inbox, by the way, one of the first early versions was actually, we showed the tabbed inbox working. To people, but it wasn't really Gmail. It was just a facade of HTML and behind the scenes. And according to the permission…”
Cagan: Pichai names coaching ability as Google's top leadership requirement
“Sundar at Google has been saying that the number one thing they look for in their leaders is a good coach. The number two thing is that they're not a micromanager and they know how to empower their teams.”