Authors: Douglas Edwards
By the time I got to work, the TV was on in the blue conference room. A couple of engineers sat transfixed, bowls of soggy cereal untouched on the table in front of them. I sat down at the table to watch and didn't move for thirty minutes. "Oh my God," I thought. "Oh my God." I didn't think much beyond that. It didn't occur to me that there might be something I could do about what I was seeing. The disaster was on the other end of the country, three thousand miles away. I never once considered that I worked for a powerful global information service—that Google could somehow offer assistance.
Sergey walked in. He was frowning and clearly agitated. But his mind was clear. He saw problems and it never occurred to him that we could
not
help—that we
would
not help. He had been having trouble accessing online news organizations. People desperate for information had besieged them and choked their servers. He directed us all to begin downloading the HTML for news reports from whatever sources we could access. He wanted the text and the images too. He had already spoken to our webmaster Karen and to Craig, one of the few engineers who could manually push changes out to our website. We would harvest whatever pages we could and host them on
www.Google.com
, which was better able to handle high volumes of traffic than the
New York Times
or
CNN.com
.
No one asked whether it was within our legal rights to appropriate others' content. We didn't debate whether linking to cached news reports fit our brand, our mission, or our role as a search engine. No one argued that the links would disrupt the aesthetics of our homepage. People urgently needed information and couldn't get to it. We could help them. Clearly it was our responsibility to do so.
I realized then how much Sergey saw Google as an extension of himself. It wasn't an anonymous corporation bound by industry traditions. He had created it with Larry, and the only rules that applied were the ones they agreed upon. As William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer had imposed their personalities upon their newspapers, Larry and Sergey had imprinted Google with more than just lines of code. The difference, though, was that Google's founders used the power of their "press" to present not just their own viewpoints, but all viewpoints.
I went back to my desk and checked my inbox. "Is New York alive?" read the subject line of a note from Chad.
"Oh, Christ," I thought. That's right. Google had an office in midtown Manhattan. Eric Schmidt was supposed to be visiting there that morning. The answer came back from New York that everyone was okay. They had evacuated their office near the Empire State Building when the first plane hit. They were shaken and they were concerned about friends and family.
My brain finally unfroze, and I thought about what Sergey was trying to do. I realized it would be better to host real news content than to put up a random collection of bits downloaded from across the web. I contacted Martin Nisenholtz, head of the
New York Times
's online service, and asked if he wanted Google to host copies of the pages they were posting. Martin was grateful for the offer but, after checking with his webmaster, declined. They thought their servers would be able to bear the load.
Meanwhile, Karen had assembled articles from the
Washington Post
and CNN and put them up on a page at
Google.com/currentevents
. We needed a pointer from our homepage, so I jotted down a paragraph and gave it to her. It read, "If you are looking for news, you will find the most current information on TV or radio. Many online news services are not available, because of extremely high demand. Below are links to news sites, including cached copies as they appeared earlier today."
I didn't think deeply about the implications of what I had written, which would be picked apart and sniffed at in the months to come as an admission that "new media" had not yet supplanted the old in a time of national crisis. That wasn't my intent, but I knew that our web index was not updated in real time. Searches on Google would fail to bring up any recent news, so the best we could offer users was links to news sites that appeared to be functional plus copies of static reports. It seemed obvious to me that live televised images from New York would be the most informative window on what was happening right at that moment.
The mainstream media, however, were not so quick to write off the power of Google. Within half an hour after the message went up, ABC News had asked for a link to their site. Then came MSNBC. We added them both, and in so doing exceeded the character limit for our HTML table, breaking Google's homepage. Karen and Marissa scrambled to fix it as the mood of the day swung between depression over the events, obsession with garnering every scrap of information, and stress over trying to devise more things we could do quickly to help.
We fed relevant keywords into the advertising system so that searches on topics like "World Trade Center" displayed messages linking to our news page. We prepared a link to the Red Cross to encourage blood donations, then discovered that their site had been overwhelmed and couldn't be accessed. Our engineers ran a special crawl using the new incremental indexing tool we had been building for the Yahoo deal, so searches would bring back up-to-date results from news sites.
We were soon flooded with email from well-meaning users who wanted Google to help them help others. Most of the mail was about the ad hoc news directory we had created. Requests to be added to the list of links increased with each update we pushed out. A webmaster had a site where people could post messages letting others know they were safe. A Wiccan wanted a pointer to her "online healing book." An old friend at
Salon.com
wanted a link to their coverage. A British user suggested we add sources outside the United States. I explained to all of them that our mission was not "to replace news services online, but to help people get info they can't get otherwise." Still, the cascade of incoming links became a cataract, roaring in concert with the rush of the news from New York and the Pentagon and Pennsylvania.
I agreed about the value of adding a global perspective, so I asked Googlers what sites they used abroad. They sent back sources in German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Romanian, Polish, Spanish, Basque, Ukrainian, Japanese, and Russian. I dutifully checked them all. Unfortunately, I couldn't read any of them, so I had no way to evaluate whether they were espousing extremism in their bold headlines or had bias buried in the tiny type below. I tried to get confirmation from at least two Googlers before passing the sites along to Karen to post. The engineering team sent me a list of the top news sites they were seeing in the search logs—an indication of what sources people around the world were trying to find. If I couldn't get validation from staff, I took search popularity as a vote for legitimacy.
As the changes rolled out throughout the day, user reaction was all over the map. Some praised us for the useful information. Others complained about the wording that directed people to their TVs. Some sniffed that it wasn't our role to act as a news provider. Some warned us that our uncluttered interface had drawn them to us in the first place and threatened to leave if we didn't clean up the homepage and lose the links.
I wondered at the parochialism of these people. Didn't they understand that something extraordinary had occurred, requiring extraordinary measures on our part? To be fair, if Sergey hadn't taken a hammer to the image of a polished and perfect brand I had carried with me to Google, I might have been confused as well. We were a corporation, a legal entity providing a product solely to earn a profit—yet here we were, acting like a well-meaning bystander attempting CPR at a car wreck. Should we maintain professional detachment instead of throwing up hurried HTML that made our homepage a mess?
And then there were those who thought we weren't doing enough. A German user suggested we paint our logo black. Steve Schimmel in our business development group argued that our response lacked a "human side"—that we should put a "message of sorrow" on the homepage. Cindy and I disagreed with both of them. It didn't feel appropriate to jump in so quickly with a condolence message, while news was still pouring out. Would we look insincere? Awkward? Or worse, would we seem to be capitalizing on a national tragedy? I didn't want to make any rash decisions we might later view as ill-conceived. Already I saw disturbing opportunism cropping up around us. One news organization asked to be moved higher on our list while others demanded to know why their competitors appeared and they didn't. The jostling and jockeying for position intensified by the hour.
I shared with Steve my belief that expressing personal grief through our website logo or a homepage message would trivialize an overwhelming tragedy. The wound was too raw for us to give voice to the pain we all felt. What I didn't tell him was that I felt it would be self-aggrandizing, as if Google were saying, "Look at us. Look how important we are. On this day of despair, we're making a statement on our homepage. Isn't that special?"
As usual, Sergey was there to help with my dilemma. "I'd like to put a mourning message on the site," he said. "Offering condolences and a link to more information." Okay then. I drafted the wording and sent it to him, along with my reservations about his timing. He brushed off my concerns and directed me to put up a link the next day, pointing to our expression of sorrow and support.
I went home that evening shaken and depressed. At least I had been able to share in the illusion that I had been doing something useful instead of sitting by and watching impotently.
"So this is how Google handles a crisis," I thought, as I monitored email late into the night. We had no comprehensive plan in place, but there was neither panic nor chaos. In this unique set of circumstances, people did what they did best and thought about how they could do more. We worked through problems, devised solutions, and calmly discussed contentious issues. Ultimately, our leaders made decisions that ended debate and we moved ahead.
The next day did not start well. The
Washington Post
interpreted our message directing users to their TVs to mean Google itself had been unable to handle increased traffic. Users asked why we had not modified our logo to honor those killed, or at least put a flag on our homepage to show solidarity with our countrymen. We changed our logo for less important things. Why not this? I've explained how I felt about a commemorative logo, but I had separate reservations about pasting a flag on the homepage. To me, waving the Stars and Stripes would provide immediate gratification but send the wrong message. I felt physically ill watching my country under attack, but I didn't want Google making a knee-jerk nationalistic gesture just to prove we were loyal Americans. Too many people had claimed moral superiority before 9/11 because they had flags in their hands—even as they acted to promote their own interests.
My dad flew night missions with the OSS over Germany and occupied France during World War II. He taught me that anyone can wave a flag; that the true measure of patriotism is what you actually do when your country needs you. I took that message to heart. Still, we at Google were Americans and we wanted to show our support—and it quickly became obvious that our users, at least those in this country, expected us to do so. I tried to figure out a way to do it appropriately.
Meanwhile, Tim Armstrong, the head of our New York sales team,
*
told us they were planning to reopen Google's midtown office the following day. They had emptied the kitchens and given the food to firefighters and police, but they were anxious to reestablish some sense of routine.
I gave up on work. My heart wasn't in it. I started plugging search terms into Google to see what I could learn about the who and the why of what had happened. What was the significance of the date September 11? I didn't find much.
The Turner Diaries,
a neo-Nazi work of fiction dating from 1978, referred to bombings taking place in Houston on September 11. The Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles was signed on September 13. Tenuous connections at best.
More curious was a September 4 Usenet post archived in Google groups. A writer calling himself "Nostradamus" had written, "Wait 7 days, and then maybe I'll answer this post. You see, I am going away in seven days, and you will not hear from me again." Seven days later was 9/11. Kulpreet, our in-house attorney, informed me that the FBI had already asked about it.
As soon as the names of the suspected terrorists were released, I ran them all through Google. Only one returned something interesting. A Palestinian relief organization headquartered in the United States showed up when I searched for Mohamed Atta. However, his name was nowhere to be found on the site. I clicked on Google's cached version of the page, a snapshot of the way the site had looked when we crawled it weeks earlier. That older version of the page referred to several cases the organization had been involved with, including that of a seventeen-year-old Mohamed Atta. Atta had been helped with medical treatment at an American hospital after being admitted with a gunshot wound. I checked the current version of the website again, but Atta's story no longer appeared—and as far as I could tell, his bio was the only one that had been removed. I had no idea how common the name Atta was, and I didn't know if this was the same Mohamed Atta who had been identified as a hijacker, but I wanted to help and the deletion seemed suspicious. Unsure what to do with the information, I consulted Sergey. He told me to pass it on to the FBI.
Sergey, too, had been thinking about how Google might be used to identify the terrorists, but his thinking went deeper than mine. First, he forwarded to Karen and me a Terrorist Activity Information form to post on the site so that users could report tips to the FBI. Then he very quietly asked a small group of us to begin checking our log files.