Moma Intranet and Search

The intranet homepage of Google at www.corp.google.com offers all kinds of customizable info boxes. At the left side, there’s general information for employees, lunch info, and a pointer to Google Tech Stop, Google’s internal support. At the top, there’s the MOMA search box.

In the main content area, a welcome box for the “Noogler” (a new Google employee) links to what seems to be an introductory help page, suggesting the new employee to file a ticket if there’s still an open question. A warning-style message says that the “Trading window closes”. An internal Google news box feeds employees with the latest happening inside and outside Google; one item for instance reads “Setting Our Sites High – Announcing the public release of Google Sites”. Also, several communication tools are linked; Google Mail, Calendar, Talk, Blogger, Mailman (“email-based lists”), Sparrow (“shared lists”), a wiki, Writely & Trix (that’s Google Docs and Spreadsheets), and more.

As above screenshot shows, the Moma search box has a kind of auto-results feature. The employee enters “dasher,” and a box expands showing information like “Dasher ... Code name for Google Apps For Your Domain”. Several “Googler-added” links to Google’s intranet wiki are available as well. A glossary link points to information on “Dasherize”. Auto-completion into terms like “dasher dashboard” or “dasher zoo” are offered as well.

To take a look at a Moma search result page, check out the screenshot Google shows off at their blog.

Google Intranet : MOMA

What do around 16,000 Google employees stare at in the morning when they’ve arrived at the office? They might be looking at Moma, the name for the Google intranet. The meaning of the name of “Moma” is a mystery even to some of the employees working on it, we heard, but Moma’s mission is prominently displayed on its footer: “Organize Google’s information and make it accessible and useful to Googlers.”

Moma “was designed by and for engineers and for the first couple of years, its home page was devoid of any aesthetic enhancements that didn’t serve to provide information essential to the operation of Google. It was dense and messy and full of numbers that were hard to parse for the uninitiated, but high in nutritional value for the data hungry.”

Here’s a picture of the Moma homepage that we got hold of – please note that large areas have been grayed out or whitened out:

On the top of the Google intranet homepage, you’ll find the logo reading “Moma - Inside Google.” Next to it is a search box allowing you to find information from Moma in general, information on specific Google employees, information on availability of meeting rooms, building maps and more. You can choose to include secure content or not via a checkbox. Another checkbox offers you to use “Moma NEXT" for a more experimental variant of search results.

To the top right, there’s an option to switch to iMoma, an iGoogle-style tool prepared by the company which allows further customization of the intranet start page. This way, employees may be able to select their own news and service widgets of interest to be displayed when they log-in.

The actual content of the homepage in the picture is split up into 4 columns. To the left, there’s a “My Office” section, with information for employees and a way to choose your own office for more relevant links. It’s followed by the sections “Survival Kit” and “My shortcuts.” In the middle columns, news gadgets are headlined “Welcome to Google!,” “Communications,” “HR” (human resources), “Company Info” and “Internal Google news,” all in common soft shades of Google base colors. The right column is listing Google teams.

Searching Moma

When you perform a search on Moma, you will see a result similar to the following; this screenshot, which was edited by Google to include comments, has been published by the Google Enterprise Blog in a post of theirs in July to show-case the kind of functionality available:

On the image, you will see a “universal search" style result including employee information, bookmark results, documents hosted on Google’s intranet, and a list of related queries. Users get to choose between ordering by date or by relevance. One can also limit the results to different segments like “Tech,” “Official,” or “Community.” Google in their blog said the use the Google Search Appliance to power this service.