Reporter's Notebook: A top Google engineer gives a rare sneak peek into how the search site perceives and uses PDF documents.ORLANDO, Fla.—To outsiders, Google as a company seems to have retained the quirky flavor of a small Internet startup despite running the world's most visited Web site.
But creativity still happens as in the old days: Marissa Mayer, Google vice president of search products and user experience, recounted in her May 10 keynote address here at the Aquent Graphics Institute's Adobe Acrobat & PDF Conference how she and Google founder Larry Page themselves hacked together the system of converting the first paper book into a Google Book, downloadable as PDF files.
First, Mayer and Page set up a hi-res camera, held in place with rubber bands. She flipped the pages while he ran the shutter. Yet it wasn't quite working out until they broke out another piece of hardware not normally associated with photography: a metronome, the device musicians use to keep steady time while playing their instruments.
"We [took the pictures] to the beat of the metronome, so he wouldn't be taking pictures of my thumbs," said Mayer, an artificial intelligence specialist who was one of Google's first employees and did much of the early development of the search engine's interface.
Since that fateful day, Page, Mayer and a legion of Google believers have uploaded more than a million volumes to Google Books. Mayer, who calls the project "Google's moon shot" at making the most well-researched information available online, says the site continues to work with libraries and publishers to expand the titles it offers.
Read the full story on PDFzone: PDF Too Slow for Google?
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