Behind the machine that is Google there is a very human face. Started by Kevin Gibbs, Google Autocomplete has grown to be the largest employer in the world assuming it is not run by a computer but people working real time to give you suggestions.
Typing a single letter starts a chain of ten suggestions. A single ‘H’ and you get suggestions like ‘how do you write a worthwhile news article’ or ‘how best to sing happy birthday to yourself’ or ‘happiness is real?’ and the list goes on with the generic recommendations everybody gets. Such a simple effective tool but let’s take a look inside to see the work Google’s Autocomplete Group (GAG) goes through for every one of your searches.
We’ll start with Barbara Blackburn and reel it in from there. In 1946 just one year after the surrender of Japan in WW2, on a QWERTY keyboard Barbara typed 216 words in a single minute. That’s 3.6 words per second. The average word length of an English word is 4.7 characters. So every second Barbara hit just about 17 keyboard keys.
Imagine you’re working for GAG and have to keep up with Barbara’s google search. If you have to come up with ten suggestions per keyboard hit because the suggestions change as the customer hits more keys then already you have to assume there are ten people assigned to Barb’s search. Each person giving a different solution. Then there must be a supervisor overseeing the ten GAGs to make sure that two GAGs aren’t making the same suggestion. Each one of these GAGs then has to be able to refine their suggestion 17 times per second for the roughly 3 seconds it takes for Barb to finish her search. This means the GAGs come up with about 510 suggestions in 3 seconds or 170 suggestions per second. Makes you wish there were muscles in your hands to do steroids and strengthen the fingers.
In most cases GAGs deal with us Average Joes typing around 40 words per minute or .7 words per second which is 3 keyboard hits per second. A much more manageable number but to maintain quality of service GAGs stay in their teams of ten with a supervisor making it the largest workforce in the world.
Google receives 63,000 searches per second. If the average search takes 3 seconds then a GAG team is occupied for those 3 seconds in which 189,000 searches occur. Each one of those unique searches would need it’s own GAG team of eleven so roughly 2 million employees are employed at any given moment to handle that output. Factor in the risk factor of peak search hours Google adds a 20% buffer making sure that there are 2.4 million GAGs working at any given time. Three shifts a day plus weekends makes 21 shifts in a week and so to cover all searches 24/7, 365 days a year GAG employs a total of 8.7 million to ensure all your search suggestions are of the utmost quality. To give this some perspective, the second biggest employer, Wal Mart, only employs 2.3 million humans worldwide.
With a cubicle size of 6 feet by 6 feet plus communal space and hallways GAG covers 380 million SQFT of commercial office space. This converts to 59,000 square miles which justifies why the GAG headquarters is bigger than the entire state of New York.
GAGs IT department is top notch. Knowing they have to get computers up and running as quick as possible a lot of them spend 3 years training in a NASCAR Pit Crew perfecting their speed and efficiency.
GAG has become a backbone of our society and definitely takes its toll on the workers. One GAG had this to say about the job:
“It wears on you quick. Early in the shift you can feel your palms grow sweaty, knees weaken and your arms go heavy. My mom prepares my lunch but sometimes I don’t even have time to eat the spaghetti. I get so nervous on the inside but have to look calm and ready on the surface. You can get so worn down sometimes you choke and the suggestion don’t come out. You have to find a way to snap back to reality and get the job done before you lose gravity. You can lose yourself in the typing, the moment.”
GAG drug of choice is caffeine. Every GAG team is assigned one barista for a total of 800,000 GAG baristas that fuel the furious typists. The coffee farm that supplies the baristas with their precious beans is said to cover half of Argentina and employs thousands of farmers.
When Kevin Gibbs founded GAG I’d imagine he had no idea that he was forming the lifeblood that would run our modern economy creating jobs and providing intelligence to the entire world. Currently run by Mavis Beacon herself, GAGs future is in good hands. However, there are rumors that GAG may look into automating the Autocomplete process but many are skeptical that a feeble machine could complete the job of the world’s greatest workforce. When asked to comment on this, one GAG member had this to say, “Pssssh, puhlease…”