I spent Friday and Saturday at the Googleplex in Mountain View, where I spoke about “The First Campaign” as part of Authors@Google on Friday and then attended a conference by the American Democracy Institute on Saturday and moderated a panel on open source government.
The ‘Plex was fascinating to see in person. You can see my full Google Flickr set here. Here was my favorite:
The sign over the desk in each lobby constantly scrolls through the active searches on Google. It shows approximately one out of every 100 Google searches, filtered for porn. The top search on Google? Yahoo. I stood there quite a long time watching the waves of search terms. There really is someone interested in everything.
The rest of the campus was much as you would expect an office to be that had fun toys and lots of food. There were well-stocked mini-kitchens everywhere, 17 restaurants on campus (all of which are free), a big sand volleyball court, and even a endless lap pool. Free laundry facilities, bike racks, and pianos dot the buildings. The workforce was, as one might expect, overall very young but there were certainly some people who had been with Google a number of years. Overall it was very much like a cool dorm for grown-up geeks.
We toured the solar panels on the roof, which provide about 30 percent of the peak power usage for the campus. There was a ton of emphasis on green, including that evidently Google will pay any employee who buys a hybrid a $5,000 bonus (which, with most hybrids, would make them price competitive with non-hybrids).
The only real surprise? It was dirtier than I thought it would be, since there’s such an overabundance of free food on campus there was a bit of that other side of dorm life: The left-over dirty dishes piled in random corners and hallways.
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