Where Failure is an Option

There's a great interview at Slate's The Wrong Stuff blog with Peter Norvig, director of research at Google.

Here's Norvig on the company's very high tolerance for failure and errors:

In part, I think it was visionary. But, in part, it was just that the problem we are attacking made it easier. If you're doing a Web query and some of the computers break in the middle and you don't get exactly the same result as someone else doing the same query, well, OK. You don't want to drop the top result; if I do a search of the New York Times, I want nytimes.com to be the top result. But what should the 10th result be? There is no right answer to that. If a hardware error means we dropped one result and somebody had a different result at No. 10, there's no way of saying that's right or wrong. Whereas if I'm a bank, I can't say, "Oh, one out of every million transactions, I'm just going to lose that money." I can't have that level of failure. But at a search company, you're more tolerant of error.

I've been at both ends. My previous job was at NASA, where you really don't want your shuttles to blow up very often. So there they spend hundreds of millions of dollars to protect their astronauts' lives. Here, we're kind of at the other end. Failure is always an option at Google.

That's the issue, isn't it? NASA's not the only place in government where the tolerance for error is zero. And that's not always because of factors like astronauts' lives being at stake. Sometimes it's just that any mistake can be characterized as a waste of taxpayer dollars. Ironically, trying to avoid that possibility is a recipe for very expensive government.