Google Suggest was built by Kevin Gibbs, a recent Stanford grad who joined Google just a couple of months before it went public. Having spent a few years at IBM, Gibbs was drawn by the lure of big projects and “20 percent time,” as well as a new program that would shuttle workers from San Francisco to Mountain View headquarters (today, ubiquitous Google Buses are the bane of anti-gentrification San Franciscans, but at the time there was just one trip a day from the Glen Park transit station).
When he started at Google, Gibbs’s role was to work on the systems infrastructure that helped run Google’s data centers, so there wasn’t much of his day job he could do from a laptop on the shuttle, with its crappy Edge Internet connection, Gibbs said in a recent interview.
So, with that extra offline time, rather than taking a nap, he thought it would be fun to work on something that combined some of the hot new geeky developer stuff of the time
