Marissa Mayer Keynote on How Google Works

This is a video recording of Marissa Mayer’s keynote that she recently delivered at the Google I/O Developers Conference.

You’ll learn some very interesting facts about Google in this video like how they use Split A/B testing to determine the right number of pixels between their logo and the search results. Or why Google ads have a light yellow background while the industry standard is blue.

When you perform a query on Google, it will hit anywhere between 700 - 1000 machines across different Google data centers before returning the search results on your screen - and the whole process takes less than a second.

Marissa Mayer also shares some interesting facts about user behavior:

a. The default number of search results on a page is 10. If Google increased that number to 20 or 30, people were using Google less because the search pages were taking more time to display on the screen.

b. When Google reduced the size of web pages by few KBs, the normal usage increased and people would search more because small pages load faster.