ever a point where you worried that your project would get canned?
Buchheit: All the time. Again, it was sort of a much earlier time than now
where it fits in nicely. It was really kind of the first thing that diverged from the
simple idea of web search. Even Groups is still basically search—it’s just search
over public usenet posts.
So it took a while for people to get used to the idea of something different.
You have to remember that the situation between Google and Yahoo was different
at that time. It was sort of a different company with different concerns.
Livingston: Is Gmail still invitation-only?
Buchheit: No, you can sign up with a cell phone.
Livingston: And on Blogger, right?
Buchheit: We’ve extended it in a bunch of different directions. All university
students can sign up, because we wanted to make it available to students.
Livingston: What was the idea behind the invitation-only signup?
Buchheit: There were a few different factors. Again, I mention that this is a
really big thing in terms of the amount of data and everything else. A big concern
has always been that I don’t want to lose any of that data, because of course
nobody wants to lose their email. If something goes wrong with web search, you
can go back and crawl the Web again, but with email, if it’s gone, it’s gone.
I was very concerned about keeping the systems operational. So part of it
was just controlling the rate of adoption so that you don’t exceed any of those
limits. You always want to make sure that the current users are getting a good
service. Also, it controls some of the abuse, by making it harder for, let’s say, a
spammer to get 10 million accounts, which also would be bad.
Livingston: Who did you learn things from at Google? Did you have mentors?
Buchheit: I didn’t know anything about building these large systems before
working at Google. So I’d look at how different parts of Google work and sort of
say, “Does that apply to us? Can we reuse that technique?”—since there was
already a successful model of how to do these things. That was part of the challenge,
just figuring out when to copy other parts of Google and when to say,
“Our problem is too different from theirs. We have to do something new.”
Paul Buchheit 167
That took us a while to figure out. You don’t want to ignore all of those lessons,
because that would be a big mistake, but at the same time, sometimes you
really are just solving a different problem. For example, the update issue: we
needed to be able to update instantly. Something like search, you can have a

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