The Ex-Googler news just keeps coming, and news.com has post about the magic of 3 Googlers getting together to start a company.

So it seems only fitting that ex-Googlers--of which there are many these days--are setting a new trend when it comes to starting their own companies. The equation? It takes at least three former Googleheads to start a start-up. It's like forming a triangle of Google juju.

The latest upstart to be formed in this mold is Mechanical Zoo, a social search application company started by Nathan Stoll, former product manager of Google News. Stoll is joined by Max Ventilla, a former Google business development executive, and Fritz Schneider, who worked on application security at the search company for more than five years. Like many other fresh companies from Google exes, Mechanical Zoo is still in stealth mode, but it plans to launch a beta product next month.

It takes a cue from Cuill, a stealth start-up based in Palo Alto, Calif. Cuill was founded by Anna Patterson and Russell Power, former technical leads of Google's large index search engine, TeraGoogle. Its Google threesome is completed by Louis Monier, who technically is better known for being the founding CTO of one of the Web's first search engines, AltaVista. Monier was a high-profile hire at Google, but he worked there only briefly on search design.

And closes with

Triangulating a new service that Google hasn't thought of yet, or simply hasn't devoted the resources to yet, seems to be another common theme of many of these start-ups. "It's stupid to try to outdo Google. I can do more good outside Google than inside by doing something complementary," said Max Ventilla, CEO of Mechanical Zoo.

Which got me thinking, maybe the real area Google needs to keep their data center secrets from are the start-ups from ex-Googlers. One of the biggest help to ex-Googlers would be a data center infrastructure that looks just like the one they left. Most developers have no idea what the infrastructure looks like, but they do know how they want it to work. So, there is a demand for Google type of environments.  This is a Amazon's AWS. And Wired writes.

Just across Highway 101 from the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, a banner fluttering from a nondescript building heralds yet another high tech dream: Ooyala. Inside, a dozen software engineers wearing headphones pore over screenloads of code while grazing on M&Ms and organic treats served in plastic tubs. The three founders, all Google emigres, are chasing a suitably big idea — interactive "hypervideo" with seamlessly embedded links. What they're not doing is blowing capital on shiny hardware. They built their television killer using little more than the desktops in front of them, plus major slices of computing power courtesy of Mr. Bezos. "You can't execute fast when you're running to the data center every night to fix machines," says Ooyala engineering chief Sean Knapp. "Infrastructure is the big guys' most powerful asset. This levels the field."

Or at least if they are going to subscribe to a cloud service, they'll use google's service.

Network.com has an article about a bunch of ex-Google and IBMs who received a 2nd round of funding, $25 million. The green part that caught my eye is the company claims to have a method to crawl the web at 1/10 the cost of Google. Less equipment, less electricity, a much smaller environmental footprint to search the web.  This looks cool.  Actually it is Cuill.  The company is called Cuill, (pronounced "cool").

A search company founded by ex-Google and IBM employees landed $25 million in new venture funding this week, but remains in stealth mode with no indication of when its technology will be publicly available.

The search start-up, Cuill (pronounced "cool"), has reportedly told investors that it can crawl the Web at about one-tenth the cost of Google. Cuill's Web site boasts of a "new approach to search" involving a Web crawler known as "Twiceler." Details beyond that are scarce and Cuill didn't immediately respond to an interview request from Network World Wednesday.

"Cuill has assembled a premier team of search experts from Google, IBM, eBay, AltaVista, Xerox PARC, the Internet Archive and Stanford University," Cuill states in a press release. "The team is leveraging their own expertise in search architecture, relevance methods and data analysis to provide users with a better search experience."

SearchDataCenter.com has a post about Where are Google’s data centers and why do we care? And, the author asks.

So the question that’s nagging me is, what can everyone else learn from Google’s experience? Secrecy is good for business, but up until what point? I come to TechTarget with a background in journalism and public affairs, so this question is not unfamiliar to me. Many companies rely on keeping their activities and intellectual property secured, it’s common in business. But, is Google being too extreme? Do their data center facility locations really need to be kept on the “down-low”? And why do datacenter insiders care?

I've seen the posts as most of you have on the Google Data Center FAQ and the map created from the data.

Does anyone say hey look where Google went, let's follow them?

Why is Google secretive?  Maybe they are just paranoid.

Have others noticed how quiet Google has been lately in regards to their data centers?  Maybe Google doesn't like the negative PR?

Google’s data centers have had a lot of attention around the country. In Oregon, initial secrecy surrounding the company’s development of The Dalles facility was an object of a lot of public discussion, which resulted in the facility earning the moniker of “Voldemort” (a reference to the fact that the Harry Potter series character is most commonly referred to as “He Who Must Not Be Named,” and that local officials couldn’t say the “G” word while the facility was under construction). But Google let up a bit and put on a more public face in 2007, including a site tour by local reporters from The Dalles Chronicle. Google had changed its tune on keeping the activities on site “super secret” after a public backlash concerning the 15-year tax break the company received from the State of Oregon, and power consumption concerns. Indeed, the energy consumption of the company’s data centers has attracted national media attention, beyond IT-focused outlets. As the company has grown in power over the past ten years, it has increasingly attracted attention, first with its quirky dot-com work environments and employees (including Google bean-bag chairs that grace the Googleplex), to controversy over acceptance of Chinese government restrictions over search-engine deployment.

I don't care. Do you care?  Maybe nobody really does care other than the curiosity.  As the author from SearchDataCenter.com says.

So the question that’s nagging me is, what can everyone else learn from Google’s experience?

For now, the only good reason I can see to write about Google's data centers is to drive traffic.  :-)

Just when I post I can't find any Green Google electricity news.  I find an interesting Google post on Google Talk goes Green.

Google Talk goes green

Tuesday, April 01, 2008 12:01 AM

Here at Google, we're committed to helping build a clean energy future and reducing our carbon footprint. And now Google Talk is part of the solution. We don't know about you, but we were surprised to learn the inconvenient truth that every character (byte) we send in a message results in about 0.0000000000000000034 metric tons* of CO2 being released into the atmosphere! So if we can reduce the number of characters we send when we chat with all our friends, we can help the environment at the same time.
Teenagers (and some adults) must be aware of this, because they already reduce their character usage by abbreviating words and dropping vowels when they send IM and SMS (text) messages. We think this is a great idea. If all our millions of users started using IM-speak, we'd save hundreds of millions of wasted (and environmentally damaging!) characters.
For example, if we want to say:
As far as I'm concerned, you can give me the twenty dollars you owe me when I see you later.
You could save more than 50% in wasted characters by saying:
AFAIC, U can gve me the 20 $$ YOM whn I CUL8R.
In honor of Earth Day (3 weeks from today: April 22, 2008), on that day our Google Talk servers will start automatically sending your conversations using IM-speak instead of normal words. But you can help save some computing power (and more wasted energy!) by shortening your conversations yourself.

Is this really Green, or the smart Google guys have figured out that this is a way to position a cost reduction?

It is posted on April 1, so it is an April Fool's joke.  Being Green to the point of being silly. :-)