Obama's Google Moderator stats

watch ticking

>> Guest: Google has a really quirky culture. One of the things that I love about Google is we have this meeting on Friday evenings called TGIF, and Larry and Sergei and Eric assumed spelling will stand up in front of the entire company. You know, you can come join in the room or the rest of the company conference is in, and after with some prepared remarks, we always open up to question and answer. And as you can imagine, most of our employees can't physically be in the room. And so a 20 percent project was created to create an online like a Wiki Board that would allow you to post a question and allow others to vote on it. So that when it came time to take questions, the top-ranked questions, the questions the employees really cared about -

>> Host: Yeah.

>> Guest: Rose to the top. That was done as a 20 percent project. And in, in time, that project added on top of Google App Engine got incredibly broad adoption even outside of, outside of Google.

>> Host: So you actually wanted to show us. You use this for, or actually I should say you used it, but the White House used Google Moderator for Barack Obama's recent -

>> Guest: Yeah. It, it was crazy. We get a phone call, and we find out that, that the President wants to use Moderator, the White House is going to use it, and at first, we were excited, and secondly, we had fear strike our hearts thinking, oh, my God. You know, we're going to melt a data center. What's going to happen here? The chart we're showing you here in something we've never shown publicly. We got approval from the White House to show this. What you're looking at is as, as the President on whitehouse.gov issued a blog post that announced it. You can see that first spike at a 100 qps. Then you can see the next day as CNN, NPR, the "New York Times" encouraged people to go up and join this historic online town meeting with a sitting president, other people started posting questions. You can see where we added a home page for motion on Google at 5 P.M., and we got to about 300 qps, but you can see most Americans waited until three hours before the cutoff to, to submit questions. And look at that spike as people went up and posted 3.6 million votes. Spiking almost to 700 qps. And then -

>> Host: Qps mean questions per second?

>> Guest: It's, it's, it's actually queries per second.

>> Host: Oh, queries per second.

>> Guest: It's, it's, it's, it's, it's the measure we use internally -

>> Host: OK.

>> Guest: To measure traffic, and then you can see as the President was speaking at 11:30, you can see everyone went to that board and was looking at, looking at the various questions. Now, if you were tasked to build something like this nation scale, maybe world scale, we, we had no way to predict how many people were going to post questions, alright. Well, you have to have infrastructure that does that, and Google App Engine, that is one of its core value propositions. We handle the scaling for you. You don't have to carry pagers. We take the Google scale, allow you to run that app, and, and by the way, the 45,000 other apps on Google App Engine were totally unaffected by this much scale. And so, and it's free to get started.

watch ticking

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Techologies ====