Sophia Lin Transcript
Kerry Diamond
Hi everyone. You are listening to Radio Cherry Bombe, and I'm your host, Kerry Diamond, coming to you from Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center in New York City. Each week, we feature interviews with the coolest culinary personalities around.
Today, we are diving into the world of tech with our first ever guest from Google. It's Sophia Lin, the general manager of the food vertical at Google. Sophia and I talk about her career at the tech giant. She has been there for more than a decade. We also talk about her school lunch situation when she was a kid and how she almost became a pediatrician. We also chat women in tech, of course, and what's new in terms of food and restaurant search at Google. Sophia will be with us in just a moment.
This episode of Radio Cherry Bombe is supported by Käserei Champignon, a 100-year-old cheese producer and the maker of Cambozola. This fine cheese, which I happen to like very much, is made with Bavarian alpine milk and crafted by master cheese makers dedicated to using all natural ingredients and traditional methods to create one of a kind cheeses. Cambozola, a triple cream, soft ripened cheese with delicate notes of blue is truly a cheese like no other. For more intense experience, try Cambozola Black Label, aged longer and colder than Cambozola Classic. This bold and exceptionally creamy cheese was a 2022 best in class winner at the renowned World Championship Cheese Contest.
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A little housekeeping. Thank you to everyone who joined us at Cooks and Books this past weekend at Ace Hotel Brooklyn. I had a blast and loved seeing so many of you. What else? The new issue of Cherry Bombe is finally here, Issue 20. Can you believe it? Our cover star is Erin French, the chef and founder of The Lost Kitchen in Freedom, Maine. The theme is Heart and Hospitality, and the issue is packed with amazing folks plus beautiful pictures, recipes, stories, and more. Visit cherrybombe.com to order your copy, and yes, we do have international shipping for our friends outside the U.S.
Now, let's check in with today's guest. Sophia Lin, welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe.
Sophia Lin:
Thank you, Kerry. I'm super excited to be here.
Kerry Diamond:
I'm so happy to have you on the show because to be honest, I didn't even know a job like yours existed.
Sophia Lin:
I didn't either for what it's worth, so I feel incredibly lucky.
Kerry Diamond:
We will find out more about that. Before we get into the nitty gritty of your job, I'd love to know a few things about you so our audience can know a little bit too. Where did you grow up?
Sophia Lin:
Born and raised in the Bay Area in California.
Kerry Diamond:
And who cooked when you were younger?
Sophia Lin:
My mom, so food has a really big sentimental place for me, but I grew up on mom's cooking and sometimes even during high school would be the awkward turtle who walked home to eat food at home and then go back to school.
Kerry Diamond:
You would leave?
Sophia Lin:
I know. I think that is-
Kerry Diamond:
Wow, you would leave school, go home and eat lunch and go back. That's amazing. You've got to tell us, what was your mom making that drew you back home for lunch?
Sophia Lin:
My parents immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan, and so I grew up actually only eating Asian food. It'd be all kinds of chicken, fish, vegetable dishes, things like that. I didn't actually have American food until I went to college, and so meatloaf for example, I was just like, "What is this?" I realize it makes me sound absolutely basic, but it was really fun for me to kind of go through that experience of I grew up really on home cooking Taiwanese food, and then when I got to college, it's kind of when my culinary world exploded just in terms of trying all different foods and things like that.
Kerry Diamond:
I think for a lot of us, the college cafeteria was certainly a place of discovery and exploration, but let's go back. I want to know what some of your favorite childhood foods were. What were the things your mom was making that you loved?
Sophia Lin:
It's funny because I don't know any of the English names for them, but there was one dish that I really loved where it's a whole fish that's steamed with ginger, and soy sauce, and garlic, and scallions and it was just a comfort food for me and it was really light, flavorful, and so I grew up with a lot of food that was like that. My mom was very into health. I also didn't have much junk food at home.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, wow, okay, so not a lot of desserts.
Sophia Lin:
Well, except for my family is very big on cake in terms of there really needs to be no reason for us to buy an entire cake. I did not realize this was abnormal until I got much older and people would be like, "Don't you only buy it for celebrations like a birthday?" And we're like, "No, we just have cake every weekend. That's not normal?" And so, we do eat a lot of cake.
Kerry Diamond:
Store bought or homemade?
Sophia Lin:
Both.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. And who's the baker in the family?
Sophia Lin:
Actually all of us. My brothers are much more accomplished both chefs and bakers than I am, although they tend to go toward more bread and wine reduction sauces and things like that. I'm a little bit more simpler. I'm more of the Christmas cookies and other things.
Kerry Diamond:
You have been at Google for is it 15 or 15 plus? You've been there a long time.
Sophia Lin:
Yeah, I think it's 15 plus now.
Kerry Diamond:
I will say, I spent a short period of time working for Yahoo. When Marissa Meyer took over at Yahoo, I was the Editor-in-Chief of Yahoo Food and-
Sophia Lin:
Oh, cool.
Kerry Diamond:
We were based here in New York, but the few times I got to go out to, was it Sunnyvale? Sunnyvale? Sunnydale, is that?
Sophia Lin:
Mountain View, Sunnyvale, yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
Sunnyvale. The few times we got to go out there, I will tell you, Sophia, the cafeteria situation blew my mind, and I'm guessing it's even more mind blowing at Google.
Sophia Lin:
Yeah, it's incredible. I would say that's probably by far my favorite perk of all.
Kerry Diamond:
So it spoils you a little and you don't really have to cook that much probably.
Sophia Lin:
Oh, it spoils me a lot. And actually for me, COVID was really an entire inflection in how much I was cooking because prior to that I basically ate almost every meal at work, so that was a game changer for me in terms of helping me explore a lot more recipes.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, good, good. I'm happy to hear that. Okay, let's go to Stanford. You grow up, you're walking home during high school for lunch, which is amazing, to get your mom's home cooked lunches.
Sophia Lin:
It also makes me sound incredibly dorky, but that's also accurate.
Kerry Diamond:
That's okay. I don't know, I think it's very sweet. I mean, the fact that you could even do that is really kind of beautiful. You didn't have to go through the pain of bringing your school lunch to school.
Sophia Lin:
No.
Kerry Diamond:
And being made fun of for it.
Sophia Lin:
That's true. I guess that's true.
Kerry Diamond:
Yeah. Okay, so you go to Stanford and you discover the college cafeteria at Stanford. Did you lose your mind a little?
Sophia Lin:
Oh yeah, for sure. There were so many foods that I'd only seen on TV or in shows of the traditional food that people eat, and so it was fun to just, especially at Stanford's cafes at the time where you'd pay for food for the full year, and so you basically went in and it was a free for all. I'd had these ridiculous hodgepodge meals of all kinds of random things of like, okay, today I'll have meat loaf, but maybe also some fried chicken and also some chow mein noodles and I guess you eat the way a teenager eats. But yeah, it was amazing.
Kerry Diamond:
You went to Stanford University, you got a bachelor's in biological sciences. When you were in college, what did you think/hope you might do one day career-wise?
Sophia Lin:
Oh, great question, and this is where my career journey has been an absolute sort of unexpected adventure. I really grew up thinking I was going to be a doctor and going into medicine, and this stems from when I was little. I was sick quite a bit, and so I think I just had a little bit of this relationship with doctors of really finding them wonderful people who helped me feel better, and I wanted to give that forward and bring that forth. I think in another life I would've really loved that. I loved biology and helping people has always been something that's really important to me. But I graduated college with the biology degree. I actually had a concentration in neuroscience, neither of which I use today much to my parents' demise, but decided to take a bit of time off to study for the MCATs [Medical College Admissions Test] and decide a bit of what I wanted do, and also wanted to get a bit of work experience just to experience that before I went back into school for a really long time.
Kerry Diamond:
What kind of doctor did you think you would be?
Sophia Lin:
It was a tough choice. I think the two primary areas I'd been looking at was basically either internal surgery or being a pediatrician.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, that's so sweet. I thought you might say that. Before we leave the college questions, do you remember the title of your senior thesis?
Sophia Lin:
I think it was something like, Evaluating the Neuroprotective Efficacy of, and I don't remember what the viral vector was.
Kerry Diamond:
I have it written down. Do you want me to read it? The whole thing?
Sophia Lin:
Yes, that would be great.
Kerry Diamond:
Evaluating the Neuroprotective Efficacy of a Chimeric Viral Vector Against Stress-Induced Impairments of Non-Spatial Memory. I know that's English, but you're going to have to decipher what that means for me.
Sophia Lin:
Happy to. That was actually really fun. I was working in a lab at the time where they were studying basically how stress impairs memory. My job actually was sitting in the dark room of a basement in a research laboratory having rats run different... It was called object identification tasks, but it's a really fancy way to just say you put a rat in a box and give them two objects, one is unfamiliar, one is familiar, and just based on how much it sniffs it, you know whether or not it remembers it. So, I would be in the dark basement of Stanford with two timers in my hands and just time how much the rat was sniffing each object and yeah, that was my life. The thesis probably sounds cooler than it actually was, although the findings are actually really, really cool. I think that's a large part of what science is. Your day-to-day might be mundane, but the end output is always pretty incredible.
Kerry Diamond:
What is a viral vector?
Sophia Lin:
Good question. It's basically a virus that is able to bring forward something that you're trying to deliver into the organism. So in this case, it was for us trying to be able to convert that stress hormone cortisol, in this case, into something that was productive.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, if you need to run a human study, I can tell you stress does affect memory. I'm here to vouch for that.
Sophia Lin:
I've been a victim of that myself, yep.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay, so let's go to Google. How'd you wind up at Google? You didn't become a pediatrician. How'd you wind up in the tech world?
Sophia Lin:
It was during my year that I took a bit of time off to think about working and study for MCATs, and I actually saw Google as I was walking through a career fair at Stanford and stopped by the table just because I was such a huge fan of the company and of search. For me, especially when I was growing up, I still remember going to the library and needing to pull books by filling out those little paper cards and you'd give it to the librarian, things like that.
When search engines came out, it was such a game changer for me, and I was one of those kids that was always staying behind, especially in biology class and asking questions like, "Why does this happen?" And those kinds of things, so having a search engine and being able to ask those questions was great. Where else can you ask, "What's an axolotl?" And then turnaround and ask, "How can I tie a tie?" And then turn around and ask, "I need an asparagus recipe." For me, it was just a really magical product and I was super passionate about it. That actually by happenstance turned into, they said, "Give us your resume," even though I had no degree that was related, and that kind of just snowballed.
Kerry Diamond:
So, that was your first job out of college?
Sophia Lin:
It was.
Kerry Diamond:
You've been at Google this whole time. That's amazing.
Sophia Lin:
I have.
Kerry Diamond:
All right, so today you are the general manager of the food vertical at Google.
Sophia Lin:
Yeah.
Kerry Diamond:
What is the food vertical? I didn't even know Google had a food vertical.
Sophia Lin:
I like to think of it as the full funnel experience for what a person might go through as they're looking for food. We do everything from your upfront discovery and exploration features if you're finding a place to eat or looking for a dish, through to maybe you're trying to do a comparison in decision making, and then finally when you're trying to take action. We help people make reservations, get directions to the restaurant, or order delivery or takeout.
Kerry Diamond:
You previously worked on Google Maps and Google Ads. Why did you move to the food vertical?
Sophia Lin:
Search and Ads, I started with my journey just because I wanted to understand the search engine, and then from there actually, I was asked to take on the Ads role and it was fun just learning about this new side of the business, but I wanted to work on Maps because I have absolutely no sense of direction and was just one of those people who would print out paper directions. You'd drive off the side of the page where the map was, and then I'd be hopelessly lost calling people to help me get back home.
I worked on Maps for a while helping to build actually maps for new countries that didn't have digital maps yet, that was really fun, of water, bodies, roads, addresses, how do you figure out how to do that for a country where it doesn't exist yet? But as part of my Maps experience, actually, I started working on a project at the time to start thinking about how we could help turn our Google Maps app into something that went beyond directions to help people make decisions about where to go. That's actually how I got involved in food and then ultimately, that brought me back to search, as well.
Kerry Diamond:
Now, you've been at Google for more than 15 years. That seems like a lifetime these days. What has kept you there so long?
Sophia Lin:
It's really that I feel like I've almost been able to have a bunch of mini careers under an umbrella of some consistency of just really wonderful people that I work with that I feel like I'm constantly surrounded by people that are smarter than me, and it both terrifies me, but really inspires me to do better and grow and be better. There's just this hunger for wanting to do something to really help people and change the world, and so those two things have been consistent even as I've moved through different products, which I think in the outside world would've been different companies, and so I feel like I've had multiple careers, but under this umbrella that's been relatively consistent.
Kerry Diamond:
What we probably have in common is in all the sort of big corporate jobs I've had, I always felt like I was in grad school. It never felt like a job, it felt like every day was grad school.
Sophia Lin:
That's a good way to explain it. I have a ton of fun every day, which I always feel pretty lucky about.
Kerry Diamond:
You're also super involved in some of the different groups at Google. Now, you have to explain this to me. I know Google has over a hundred thousand employees. At a smaller company, you don't necessarily have all these groups, but at Google, that's a thing. Explain what all these groups are about and why they even exist.
Sophia Lin:
It's not, I think, something people know that Google does internally, but we actually run a lot of programs to just help with diversity and inclusion because that's something in tech, I think historically, that's been really hard. Google, as a company, has really pushed on how do we actually not only make the workforce more diverse, but also I think the inclusion part is really critical because I think what they found over time was you can hire in a bunch of people with different perspectives, but if they don't feel welcome and included and have a seat at the table, that's really, really hard.
Some of the groups I'm involved in at Google, one is with the Asian community in terms of just trying to make sure that Asians are represented and have a place to have dialogue. Then the second one where I'm probably the most involved is with the women communities in tech. I think growing up in tech, I still remember when I would often be the only woman in the room. I grew up with two brothers, so it didn't affect me too much at the time, but over time I really saw how it impacted a lot of women around me. I also just myself benefited from so much sponsorship and advocacy by both women and men leaders within Google and that became really important to me to try and pay that forward for other junior women as they were growing in their own careers.
Kerry Diamond:
How much has that changed?
Sophia Lin:
A lot. For example, my organization, I think we're about 40% women now, which might be due to, I think obviously as a lot of research has shown, the more you have women in leadership and women on teams, that actually then of course begets actually more women being interested in the organization, as well.
Kerry Diamond:
Now, you are the executive co-lead for the Search Women group at Google. Google Search, we all know Google Search, but what is the Search Women group?
Sophia Lin:
It's a group that's really just built around creating a safe, supportive environment for women to express themselves. We do events, that's everything from if you are thinking about having a family and balancing that with career, how do you think about that and navigate that? Or one of the things we talk a lot about at Google is this concept of imposter syndrome, of feeling like you don't belong because everyone around you is so amazing, and so talking to people about how to navigate that. Then just having panels where people can ask women leaders questions about their careers, their own journeys, share their stories. Then recently with some of the harder tragedies in the news, we've also done a lot of support groups to just be a place where people can share their feelings and their emotions.
Kerry Diamond:
There's another group you sponsor, and that's the Women at Food Group at Google. That sounds like potentially a fun group. What's that all about?
Sophia Lin:
Oh, it's an amazing group. That's actually the group of women within my food organization and very similar to the Search Women Group, we really focus on how to build an inclusive and safe psychological space for people to come and share their feelings. Then especially since we're the food team, a lot of the events often include food, so we're gathering around lunch or sharing treats or just talking about things while we're also partaking in and breaking bread together.
Kerry Diamond:
I know Google was doing a lot of things with bringing guest chefs in, this was before the pandemic, has that started up again?
Sophia Lin:
I haven't seen it as much lately, but one of the things they did during the pandemic that I thought was really, really charming was because people couldn't go into cafes, they actually held a series of online cooking classes to try and teach Googlers how to cook, as well as just different programs where they would have a chef come in and talk to them about knife techniques or things like that. We kind of had a version of that during COVID when everything was remote, but in person events I think are still creeping along. They're not quite fully back yet.
Kerry Diamond:
Well, I hope that gets to come back because I do remember it was very much a badge of honor for a lot of chefs who got to go to the different-
Sophia Lin:
Oh, really? That's wonderful.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh my gosh, really. They talked about it as if they'd won a James Beard Award or something when they would get to go be the visiting guest chef at the Google Cafeteria here in New York City. If you can bring that back, I know that means a lot to the chef community.
Sophia Lin:
Oh, that's awesome. That's actually great because for Googlers it means a lot too. I still remember Alton Brown came to our campus like years ago and I got my book and I had him sign it, and my brothers were so jealous because they were huge fans of him. So yeah, I've always enjoyed when the chefs came to visit.
Kerry Diamond:
Good. Well, I have a long list of female chefs if you need it. Okay, let's talk about Google search. Your Google Search on 2022 event took place the day before our interview, and the big message was that search is becoming more intuitive and natural. Tell us what that means.
Sophia Lin:
As we were kind of dreaming up and explaining the directions search could go, one of the things we always anchored back on was Google's mission, which is to organize the world's information and make it more universally accessible and useful. We were thinking about, well, what does that mean now? The theme we landed on was Search Outside the Box, which I really love because I think it starts really pushing the envelope a little bit on where does search need to go as the world has really changed so much since we first became a company. We started thinking about how can we flex tech to really help people search in more natural intuitive ways the way that they would maybe ask a question to a friend or have a conversation or a dialogue with someone. That applies, especially, when you're looking for food.
Kerry Diamond:
I'm not sure who it was who spoke, I saw you had lots of speakers, you were one of the speakers, but they said that the age of visual search is upon us and that the camera is the next keyboard. I thought that was so fascinating.
Sophia Lin:
Yeah, me too. I think that was Prabhakar [Raghavan], who leads this area. I agree, and I think you see with some of the rising apps that are popular with incoming generations today is the language and the dialogue of how people interact with the world is just changing a lot.
Kerry Diamond:
In researching you and the questions and what is new in search at Google, I realized how much I'm using my Google Maps app the way I used to use the search bar. It's probably my most used app today when I really think about it. It's just amazing how much you can find through the Map app these days.
Sophia Lin:
Exactly. I think what we found with both Search and Maps is they're both wonderful products for information and it sort of just matters what your primary constraint is if you're looking for information and especially if you want to research and get a bunch of different sources that you can look through, Search is such a wonderful place for that. If you have proximity constraints or location's really important to you, I think that's when people really naturally turn to Maps.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us what's new in food search.
Sophia Lin:
I am excited to do that. There's four different things that we launched all leaning into this idea of how do we make searching for food more natural and intuitive. I'll run through each of them and try and keep it brief.
The first one is the ability to actually search for dishes on search. Today, if you were to type in something, I think the example I used in the presentation yesterday was soup dumplings, because that's one of the things I really love. But if you look for soup dumpings today, you'd probably just get a list of restaurants. They may or may not have soup dumplings. You sort of have to spelunk through the photos, menus, things like that to try and figure out if they offer it.
As we were thinking about what could we do that's more helpful, we said, "What if we made a food first experience?" Instead of being place-centric, we really made it food-centric, and so if you looked up soup dumplings, what you'd see is a list of all the different soup dumping dishes around you with price information. Then one of the other things we're really excited about is starting to bring forward dietary preferences like vegetarian or vegan and making that much easier. That's what our first feature really is about is searching for dishes and being able to browse and explore food first in a world that otherwise is I think, very place-centric.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay, what's the next one?
Sophia Lin:
Next one is something we call multi-searched near me. This really goes back to the quote that you mentioned from Prabhakar of how do you start mixing multimodal media types to help people search better? The example we gave was, and this is my favorite pastry right now, which is a Kouign-Amann, which I always like to joke that it looks like a croissant and a muffin had a baby. Imagine you could stumble across a picture because a friend posted it on social media or something like that, or maybe you even saw it in a magazine and didn't know what it was. You can actually snap a picture of it and then just append "near me" to the picture and you're able to see all of the Kouign-Amann around you. In this case, maybe Manresa's would pop up, maybe if there was another bakery that had them, like Neighbor Bakehouse or Midwife and Baker. If there're different bakeries that have them present, then you can actually look through the different Kouign-Amanns nearby and pick a place to go.
Number three was us trying to tackle this problem of how do you understand what makes a place special? The problem we went back to is right now, if I look up Italian restaurants, you get a list and a bunch of places are like 4.3 star, 4.4 star, and you're sort of like, "How do I pick between all these different options?" We wanted to try and capture, what's the thing that you would give as a recommendation or insider tip if you were talking to someone and they were like, "Oh, you should really go to place X because of these aspects."
What we did was use machine learning, actually, to pull both from the photos themselves as well as reviews and insights from people that have been there to try and create these almost summaries or highlights of what really makes a place unique. Those might be specific attributes like amazing decor, incredible views, they offer authentic dishes, things like that. You're really trying to get at the heart of sometimes you're not looking for a specific dish, but you're looking for a specific vibe, so how do we help you find that more easily?
Kerry Diamond:
And then number four?
Sophia Lin:
Number four is one of my favorites, although it's very foundational. It's just digital menus. I have found that it is really difficult to find an accurate menu online. Especially, I think people don't realize sometimes how many menus exist even for the same restaurant. You might have a weekend versus weekday menu, you might have a time of day menu of brunch versus dinner, and then especially with COVID, I think you've seen a lot of restaurants who create very specific takeout and delivery menus now versus what their dining menus are too. We're finding that people are really just struggling to understand what a restaurant serves, so we wanted to really tackle how do we help people understand what's available at a business? This is again, where we're servicing not only more visually rich menus where we're attaching photos to the menu items so you get a sense of what you're potentially looking at to eat, but also the dietary preferences again of vegetarian or vegan so you get a sense of what are the options that might be best suited to you.
Kerry Diamond:
The menu part is tricky because you've got great restaurants that change their menu every single day. How do you deal with that?
Sophia Lin:
A couple different ways. The way we build our menus is actually from a variety of sources. Best case scenario is when we have a relationship directly with the restaurant, the chefs themselves can help us upload the menu and keep it updated. Also, we really rely on people who are going to the restaurant who want to just share what the restaurant is serving because they're excited about it. Then in other cases, there are restaurant websites that actually opt into this open data sharing standard. If they do that, we're able to crawl their restaurant website for them and actually update for them.
Kerry Diamond:
All right, so we got to go back on two of these points that you brought up. You said if we have a relationship with the restaurant, I'm sure we have so many chefs, and restaurateurs, and bakers and et cetera who listen to this podcast, I'm sure they said to themselves, "How the heck can I have a relationship with Google?"
Sophia Lin:
Great question. We have a product that is built for merchants called Google My Business, so through that product you can claim ownership of a business and you actually have quite a bit of control over being able to change the category of restaurant, which we sometimes find is wrong. You can upload menu items or if you decide you want to change the price for one, you can update it there. It gives you the ability to really showcase what you want to highlight for your business and really update your menus.
Kerry Diamond:
Does Google prioritize that over the user-generated content?
Sophia Lin:
If we know that the business owner claimed their business profile and proved validity of it, then yes, it's a very strong trust signal for us.
Kerry Diamond:
Oh, that's fantastic to know because I mean, you know this community. They're so passionate about what they do and so particular, and so many chefs and restaurant folks put their hearts into these things. I used to own restaurants, they're not open anymore, but I remember sometimes you would see either there was a restaurant that had a similar name to my restaurant and it would be mistagged as my restaurant, and the plating was just, it broke our hearts. Or somebody will just take a picture of the food looking terrible, the light is bad, it's half eaten, it's whatever, so that's really good to know that you're prioritizing what the restaurants and the businesses are putting out there as their official information.
Sophia Lin:
What you said actually completely resonates with me and matches everything we've heard from restaurant owners themselves, which is there's sort of one category of problems that's just information about my business is wrong or it's just unflattering. How can I give you a better picture of this dish than the half eaten one that you have as the primary dish photo? Then there's the second category that I'm actually really passionate about, which is how do we bring the restaurant owner or the chef's voice forward? Because people actually really care about who's running this business and their story and there's not really a great way for anyone to do that today, and so we've been thinking a lot about how do we bring merchant voices forward and restaurant owner voices forward in the experience more so they can tell their own stories?
Kerry Diamond:
I remember when I had the restaurants, you had to go in and verify your business.
Sophia Lin:
Yeah, Google My Business, yep.
Kerry Diamond:
Google My Business, so I took advantage of Google My Business, and I definitely noticed when we opened our first place to when we opened our last place, it improved immensely and the user experience was so much better in terms of changing our hours and things like that. If there are restaurateurs out there, and I know everybody is so exhausted and poor restaurant folks, their to-do list just gets added to every day, but if you have not claimed your business on Google, and Google is not paying me to say this, but I just know this as a business owner, you really should go in and do it if you want more control over what's being shown. It's a free tool, Google's not asking you to pay for this. I do remember back then there were some companies you had to pay to get your menu posted and it felt a little extortionist and we were very resentful of those services, but this is not the case here.
Sophia Lin:
I'm so grateful you said that because that's probably the one thing we run into is it hasn't really mattered how many marketing campaigns we run or things like that, we just can't seem to get to the restaurant community and let them know this is a free tool and we'd love for you to claim your businesses and have your voices show up more. But I mean, we also get it, running a restaurant is so difficult and there's already so many things going on that oftentimes it's hard for somebody to think, I need to find time now to use yet another tool that someone's asking me to. We are looking into ways that we can try and make that easier, even if it's by closer integration with the point of sale systems in the restaurants or things like that just so we can be more helpful and really be something that merchants and restaurant owners can lean on.
Kerry Diamond:
Even just your hours. It's so great to be able to go in there and change your hours when you need to because not everybody has regular hours now. I mean New York, you probably know this Sophia, even though you don't live here, used to be the place where you could go get anything 24 hours a day and because of the pandemic, that's just not the case anymore. Places are short staffed, they're not open seven nights a week, seven days a week anymore, so I definitely rely on the hours portion of my Google Maps when I'm looking up different restaurants.
One thing I want to ask you about, and I know The New York Times covered this, I mean I'm sure you've all talked about this internally, is those poor restaurants that were essentially being extorted or held hostage by folks who were giving them one star reviews. I read Google's response to that and they said, if anything like that is happening, if you're being blackmailed, if people are trying to extort something from you, if you're involved in some kind of scam, you can flag the reviews and you can reach out to Google Support via the help center.
Sophia Lin:
Yes, very much so.
Kerry Diamond:
The help center is not a human at first, it's a site that you go to. How fast are those things being checked out or vetted or investigated?
Sophia Lin:
I know we're taking it very seriously. It's not, unfortunately the team I work on directly, so I don't know what their turnaround time on things is, but I do know they take trust of users very, very seriously, and so we generally try and act on them as fast as possible once we receive them. I would strongly encourage, I think anytime there is any company that's acting maliciously or has an unauthorized relationship but is claiming to be your business, it's very difficult for us to know, so the more that restaurant owners can tell us that directly, the easier it is for us to actually be able to suss out what's happening.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay, so just so our restaurant friends out there know this, you can flag the reviews that you feel are fake reviews and you can reach out to Google Support via the help center. There were some other things I learned about watching Search On. There's going to be Echo friendly routing on Google Maps, which is just so interesting, and some really good privacy things that I didn't even know. You can check and see if there are things that have your phone number, your home address, and actually have them removed.
Sophia Lin:
Yeah, those are both fronts that we're pushing on a lot right now within the company. One is sustainability, and actually that's one of the things I love the most about our cafeterias right now is there's so much at the forefront of trying to be doing the right thing, so food waste is really big. They did an experiment or have done this for a long time now where our plate sizes actually got a lot smaller. It was helpful for portion size control, but it was also helpful actually just for food waste decreased tremendously when they did this because people were just not getting too much food. But we've gone fully compostable, things like that. Sustainability has been a big thing that we've been trying to do within our products, but also even just within resources in our facilities, which has been really fun to see.
Kerry Diamond:
And just back to the privacy thing, I know that's not your category of expertise at Google, but the things that they were showing during Search On, are those things that are coming or are those things that are available right now?
Sophia Lin:
It's not my feature. I don't know for sure, but given that we were talking about it, it is going to be available, if not already.
Kerry Diamond:
But it's just interesting when hearing you talk about the different groups at Google and sort of the emotional safety and things like that, which are important. The physical safety is important too, and when I saw that, I was like, "Oh my God, I don't even know what websites have my phone number and my address." So, I was happy to learn that Google is working toward making that something that you can take control over.
Sophia Lin:
For what it's worth, I've actually been internally testing that feature just as a Googler and it's been amazing. It's very empowering to go online and look yourself up and see if a website for some reason has your phone number and you don't want them to, you can actually just request to have it removed.
Kerry Diamond:
Good to know. All right. My last question is, I'm going to toss you a softball for the last one. No, I'm kidding. This is not a softball question. How do we get more women into the tech world?
Sophia Lin:
This is such a fantastic question. I really love it. I think it all starts, well, there's two things I would say. One is exposing women to people who are in tech earlier. I think I didn't even think about it when I was young because I just didn't know that many women in tech. One of the things we do at Google is we do a lot of high school and middle school outreach now, just to get girls who are growing up familiar with there is a possibility of a tech career for you, and this is what it means, so it's not just this big black box of what do people do inside this company, but here are the kind of cool projects you can work on, things like that.
The second one's a little fuzzier, but it's really just finding the right sponsors and advocates around you who can help you overcome any of the hurdles and offer guidance as you're navigating your own career and trying to decide what you want to do. For me, it's been really valuable of, as I've mentored junior women, a lot of people, their biggest challenge is themselves and what they think they should be doing or the hurdles that they think are in front of them when a lot of it is actually really about getting their own mind around if you really want to do this, we'll find a way to help you and let's go.
Kerry Diamond:
All right. Well, Sophia, I hope this is just the beginning of many times we get to talk to you. We are very happy to have a friend at Google. Thank you for taking care of the restaurant community. I appreciate it very much.
Sophia Lin:
Thank you so much, Kerry, for having me. This has been an absolute pleasure.
Kerry Diamond:
And we're going to go get one of those Kouign-Amanns at Avery Ruzicka's place. She's also got a mean chocolate chip cookie with walnuts that I am particularly fond of.
Sophia Lin:
Ooh, okay, I don't think I've had that yet. I'll have to try it.
Kerry Diamond:
I'll send you the recipe now that you're cooking a little bit more. Well, thank you so much, Sophia. It's been wonderful talking to you.
Sophia Lin:
Same. Thank you, Kerry.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. Thank you so much to Sophia Lin from Google for joining me today. If you have a small business, claim that business.
Radio Cherry Bombe is a production of Cherry Bombe Magazine. Our theme song is by the band, Tralala. Thank you, Joseph Hazan, studio engineer for Newsstand Studios at Rockefeller Center. And thank you to our assistant producer, Jenna Sadhu. And thanks to you for listening. You are the Bombe.