is one difference between a regular startup and starting within Google—I think
it’s a little bit different now, but at that time there was still this vision that, “We
only do web search.” Now we do lots of neat products that go beyond that, but
at the time, a lot of people inside the company were sort of unsure. The idea of
doing this product that was receiving all the email—and we had to store the
email, which is a different systems problem, really, from web search, because
Paul Buchheit 163
in web search you go out and you crawl the web and index that data and the
latencies are different. We go fetch a page and it gets searchable a little bit later.
But in email, everything has to be instant, and of course you can’t lose any of
the data either.
It turns out to make a big difference in how you build things. A lot of the
strategies that you might use for web search can be problematic when you
apply them to email at a systems level, simply because you need to make everything
so fast. It has to happen right away. You can’t say, “Well, we receive email
and then in half an hour it will appear.” Which is actually how it worked in one
of my early versions—the email would come in and I had this little script that
would incorporate it into the index, but it generated this long lag, and so that
wasn’t really great.
All of those little details add up to creating a lot of challenges, just to get it
all right. The JavaScript was a big deal as well, because at the time that we first
started doing the interface in JavaScript, most people thought of JavaScript as a
tool for pop-up advertising and other obnoxious things like that. This was
before the whole Ajax thing, so a lot of people were pretty skeptical that
JavaScript could work reliably. Not without justification—it is a little bit tricky
because if you do things wrong, you’ll crash the browser.
So making all of that work and work really well took some learning and figuring
out the right techniques and where to draw the line about which features
are a good idea and which aren’t.
Livingston: Which was your favorite feature?
Buchheit: That’s hard to pin down. Actually one of the things that we added
very early on, which at this point seems pretty obvious, but it turned out to be
really nice, is the autocomplete when you type in the email addresses. Once you
have it, it just seems so obvious. “Why wouldn’t you have autocomplete?”
Livingston: This was a first?
Buchheit: None of the other web mail providers had autocomplete. Now you

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