like email was strange. A lot of people were kind of unsure. At this point,
it wouldn’t seem like a big deal, but at the time it was a little bit controversial.
For quite a while I was just working on it by myself. I actually started out
with some of the Groups code, just because I was familiar with it. I built the
first version of Gmail in 1 day, just using the Groups code, but it only searched
my email. I released that to some Googlers and people said it was useful, so it
progressed from there.
Livingston: When you built this first version, was your vision to create a better
email program or was it to build something that would allow you to search
through your emails?
Buchheit: Both. Search is obviously very important. It was central to what we
were doing at the time and it’s really useful for managing your email. I had
ambitions of doing more than that, but search seemed like the natural first
step—it was one of the things that was most obviously a problem.
Everyone here had lots of email. This company is a little bit email crazy. I
get 500 emails a day. So there was a very big need for search. That was the most
obvious thing that I could do, and it was also one of the easiest. So I built this
first version and it only searched my email, but even that was useful for other
people, because we had a lot of the same email. So then they said, “It would be
even better if I could search my own email.”
Livingston: You could search for keywords, senders, etc.?
Buchheit: Yes, it was free text, just like Google is, but for email.
Livingston: Was it supposed to be your full-time gig or was it part of your
20-percent-of-your-time projects?
Buchheit: Nothing’s totally full-time, but it was mostly full-time. I still had
some other projects that I would have to spend some time on, and inevitably I
end up with side projects just because something catches my eye and I go off
and work on it for a little bit. I think I may have something to do with 20 percent
projects as well because I’ve created a few things on the side. AdSense, the
content-targeted ads, was actually something that, if I recall, I did on a Friday.
It was an idea that we had talked about for a long time, but there was this
belief that somehow it wouldn’t work. But it seemed like an interesting problem,
so one evening I implemented this content-targeting system, just as sort of
a side project, not because I was supposed to. And it turned out to work.
Livingston: This is Google’s AdSense now?
Buchheit: It’s the same concept. What I wrote was just a throwaway prototype,

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