A very nice profile of the Google company in USAToday: Today, the founders and their landlady — who wound up quitting her job at Intel to join the boys — are in different wings of the four-building sprawling campus known as the Googleplex, a 1,000-employee paradise with free food, unlimited ice cream, pool and ping-pong tables and complimentary massages, plus the ability to spend 20% of work time on any outside activity. “They built Google to be their dream environment,” Wojcicki says. And Google, in five years, has gone on to dominate Internet searching like nothing else. Rivals have been left in the dust — or became Google customers, including Yahoo and AOL, which license the technology and route search queries through Google.... Today, millions Google themselves, friends, blind dates, employers and employees. Students wait till the last minute to Google assignments. Shoppers Google products and prices before purchasing. One columnist suggested that Google is so vital in our lives that it’s a deity of sorts, everywhere and all-knowing.
