Google Hones Cutting Edge

There was a long anecdote about an engineer named Bwolen who got married during his lunch break then returned to work. Bwolen was rewarded with a PowerPoint slide in the "factory tour" that superimposed his face on the cartoon body of a superhero bounding in mid-air.

Later, vice president Tim Armstrong was praised for spending so much time at work he couldn't even sort out his socks in the laundry. It's at once a little reassuring and more than a little disturbing to think the future is in the hands of guys like this. I'm all for better search, but not if it comes at the cost of people missing out on having a life.

The big glitch of the day came when the Webcast version of the tour inadvertently showed a slide of Google's new personalized search page hours before it was to be announced (someone at Google won't be getting their wheatgrass today). That sparked a mad scramble among bloggers to post screen shots of the new product. Even the company organizing the world's information, it seems, sometimes lets it slips through its fingers.