Authors: Douglas Edwards
Over the weeks to come, I would check MOMA daily to get an update on the advertisers in our system. The number climbed with the steady speed of a veteran Sherpa. That was encouraging, but what we really needed were distribution partners who would display our ads. Overture had most of the big ones sewn up. But that, we determined, was something we could change.
We continued to bulk up as we prepared for our CPC cage match with Overture. Even marketing was given the okay to add staff, and I suddenly found myself with seven open positions and hundreds of résumés cluttering my inbox. I had no time to read them. The AdWords Select launch ate up chunks of my day, and our new venture into hardware, the Google Search Appliance (GSA), chewed up the rest. Our distributed-computing toolbar nibbled at the edges not already gnawed by catalog search. I had canned responses to feed user support and ongoing scraps with Marissa and Wayne over the translation console. I carried the résumés with me and read them while mopping up the residue of my daughter's stomach flu and while waiting for my endodontist to redo a root canal that had gone painfully wrong.
Still, I got a note from a product manager complaining that I couldn't be too busy to rewrite something a second time because he hadn't seen me in the office at two a.m. I wrote a scathing reply in which I pointed out I had been at work till three a.m. polishing AdWords Select and that, well ... let's just say it went on for a page and a half of painful detail about his need for urgency and how it related to his management style.
I hit Send and waited for the response. It wasn't long in coming. "Don't send this," Cindy advised me, as I knew she would. I always ran venting tirades by her before sending them to the people who had wronged me. She understood my wrath and sent a curt note on my behalf. I had plenty of wrath to go around during those hectic days, when the smallest bumps threatened to upset my carefully balanced tray of tasks. My buffer, as the engineers sometimes said, was full.
With Google's expansion, the engineers found that they had outgrown the grand experiment begun with the awkward July reorg. In January 2002, Wayne announced that the company's flat structure could not scale much further. Yes, the executives had a clear line of communication to engineering, but Google intended to hire another hundred engineers that year. They couldn't all report to Wayne. The new goal would be to bring the reporting ratio down to thirty-five to one. Senior managers would be hired primarily for their technical skills, not their managerial ability. These new directors would recognize technical talent when they saw it and, when needed, could lend a hand rather than just encouragement.
A month later Jonathan Rosenberg, freed from his prior commitments by the bankruptcy of Excite@Home, joined Google as VP of product management. He formalized the responsibilities of the department Larry had started with Salar and defined the role of product manager. The PMs would work with engineering to design and develop new products and features, handle cross-organizational communication, and determine product road maps.
There would soon be many PMs, with many advanced degrees from the world's top business schools, law schools, and engineering programs. Our cultural evolution would take a giant leap from single-celled amoeba to vertebrate, from anarchy and individual autonomy to the controlled chaos that, at Google, was as close as anything came to a state of order.
Jonathan's new division shoehorned itself into a crack in the org chart between Cindy's corporate marketing group and engineering. When product management had been ad hoc, my colleagues and I had worked directly with engineers to prepare products for launching into the open market. Now PMs would formally coordinate that activity and draw on the PR specialists and brand management (that is, me) as they did on other corporate resources in their tool kit.
As the product-management wedge grew wider with the influx of new hires, resistance to being displaced intensified within Cindy's world. I, for one, was willing to be integrated, but I didn't want to be shoved aside. In a growing, engineering-driven organization, the power of product management could easily become an unstoppable force. Cindy's reports, including brand management, played a secondary role. We added the clear-coat finish on a precision automobile—our efforts invisible save for a glossy shine highlighting the beauty of the machine that lay beneath. My role still had value, because I worked on the language that went into the product itself. But thinking about how users perceived the product, and the company as a whole, was a low priority. The product would speak for itself, so what mattered most was the technology and the cool things that could be done with it.
The building's population density increased, even after we pushed finance and the ads team into an adjacent office, quickly dubbed the "MoneyPlex." Stacy in HR sent out multiple memos about office hygiene and our duty to respect the micro-kitchens, load our dirty dishes, put away the milk, throw out half-eaten bananas, recycle whenever possible, leave conference rooms clean, wash hockey gear, and keep animals out of the café, the kitchens, and the bathrooms. There were policies regulating dogs left alone, animal hair, and barking, barfing, and biting.
Charlie warned Larry, Sergey, and long-suffering facilities manager George Salah that he would expire without more space. A compromise was reached. A semitractor showed up one morning belching diesel and dragging a monstrous white trailer custom outfitted with ovens, dishwashers, pothooks, and prep counters. The leviathan was unhitched and beached in the parking lot adjacent to the café to bake in the sun like the victim of a drive-by harpooning.
The trailer contained a fully equipped mobile kitchen designed for use at large outdoor events. All it required was hookups to electricity and water. Those we had, though we lacked the permits that would have allowed us to use them legally. But what's a piece of paper compared with the happiness of hundreds of Google employees? Facilities plugged the trailer in and fired it up. With its painted sheet metal glinting in the harsh summer light and smoke pouring out of its vents, the "auxiliary kitchen" immediately lowered property values throughout the manicured office park in which Google was situated. All that was missing was a rusty Ford pickup on concrete blocks and an ugly mutt chained to a lawn chair. Charlie promptly had his crew run up the Jolly Roger on a pole jutting from the trailer's roof, proclaiming the auxiliary kitchen an interference-free zone. Charlie's outlaw kitchen crew operated unperturbed except for a lone fire truck that rolled up to investigate the smoke perfuming Mountain View with the aroma of a rib joint. Its crew left without citing us. Firemen. They do love barbeque.
U
SERS WERE COMPLAINING
again. We heard a rising chorus of annoyance with pop-up ads appearing when people did Google searches. The ads opened new windows, cluttered users' desktops, and irritated the hell out of them. Either we stopped running pop-up ads, our users demanded, or they were prepared to stop using Google.
Google never did run pop-up ads. Others just made it look as if we did. A number of companies distributed free software for file sharing, media playing, and the adding of smiley faces to email. When users downloaded those programs, they unwittingly loaded their machines with code that launched pop-up ads or even collected credit card numbers and other personal information.
Some software surreptitiously took ownership of computers and made them "slavebots" that could be harnessed as part of a gigantic network to launch denial-of-service attacks or send spam. Techies called these parasitic programs "malware," "adware," or "spyware." We lumped them all together and called them "scumware."
Matt Cutts hated scumware. Intensely, personally hated it. His job focused on blocking people who tried to trick or "spam" Google into listing their sites higher in our results. He fought "black hats" every day, and scumware distributors were the worst of the worst. It sickened him that users thought we were the ones degrading their Google experience. In late 2001, he began monitoring the rise of scumware and pleading with any Googler who would listen to do something about it.
I was with Matt. I loathed seeing notes from users threatening to quit Google because of something over which we had no control. I worked with him to draft a lengthy email response, in which we explained what was happening and how to fix it. People replied with apologies and thanked us for alerting them to problems they hadn't been aware they had. Matt wanted to do more. He proposed that the Google toolbar include software that killed pop-ups and that we forward complaints we received to the FTC. He also suggested we post a note on our homepage explaining that Google was not at fault.
Wayne Rosing supported the idea of a "full-scale crusade-jihad" against those responsible, but others worried about the danger of declaring war. We suspected there were hundreds of scumware creators, and we knew they could be ... scummy. And spiteful. They didn't like to be thwarted, and they had no scruples about attacking those who tried to stop them. If we aggressively pursued them, they would target our site to make an example of us, causing even worse problems for users. Marissa suggested a compromise. If we could detect that a computer had been infected with specific scumware applications, we could show a message telling the user what to do about it. With that approach, we wouldn't confuse people who weren't experiencing problems and we wouldn't make ourselves too broad a target.
That solution turned out to be infeasible, so we fell back to posting a note linked from the homepage. We would tell users their pop-up ads weren't coming from us and casually mention that we did have our own, very discreet, very targeted, keyword-advertising program. Two marketing objectives satisfied simultaneously.
Larry didn't like the second part. Most of the people seeing our homepage would never advertise with us and might not even know we ran ads. Why disillusion them if they had no need to know? Larry never wanted to give people more information than he thought it was useful for them to have. I deleted references to AdWords.
In January 2002, we added a line to the homepage: "Google does not display pop-up advertising. Here's why." It was linked to a page that began, "Google does not allow pop-up ads of any kind on our site. We find them annoying." The response was immediate and positive, and I found it intoxicating. Google was becoming my own personal publishing platform. Mentalplex, the 9/11 news page, "Ten Things We've Found to Be True," and now "No Pop-Ups." The hits kept coming. We had built a global bully pulpit and my voice rolled forth from it. My thoughts, my ideas, my imprecations would be seen by more people than read the
New York Times
or watched a network newscast. I was the man behind the curtain giving voice to the all-knowing Oz. I tried to keep my ego in check.
The day after AdWords Select launched, the Associated Press ran a story about the service that said in part, "Online search engine maker Google Inc. is introducing a program that allows Web sites to be displayed more prominently if sponsors pay more money—an advertising-driven system derided by critics as an invitation to deceptive business practices." The article portrayed us as no better than Overture. It was flat-out wrong, yet major news outlets around the country ran it verbatim. The word "bastards" got a real workout in the Googleplex that day.
We had so carefully distinguished ourselves from the evil diminishers of search integrity, and all for naught. Cindy jumped on the AP to issue a correction, and they did, but she also reconsidered her original decision not to issue a press release about AdWords Select. She maintained a reporter-centric PR strategy of close communication with key journalists rather than "press-releasing" every burp, hiccup, and sneeze happening at the company. The strategy worked fantastically well most of the time, but when a reporter got a big story wrong, there was no official Google version to contradict it. Cindy and PR manager David Krane filed copy at two a.m. with the PR Newswire, saying, "Google's unbiased search results continue to be produced through a fully automated process and are unaffected by payment."
The AP story had been a fluke, an anomaly in a pattern of favorable press, but Cindy knew things would change. No one stayed beloved forever. Two days later she began formulating a "credibility campaign" to emphasize that not all search companies were created equal. We would use our own site to present our unfiltered messages in coordination with op-ed pieces in newspapers and executive speeches to select audiences.
"I want to kill the perception that we're selling our search results ASAP," she told us. "Our brand has been injured and we need to fix it. We're Google! Let's be outrageous and daring and have some fun with this."
Feelings ran deep on the subject of paid placement. When the topic of Google's refusal to sell placement came up on the geek bulletin board Slashdot, the first posted response was "I swear I want to make love to this company."
A self-identified Overture employee didn't share those warm and fuzzy feelings. "As for the claim by Google that they are pure," he asked plaintively, "why are they getting into the ad search business?" His implication seemed to be that the whole business was tainted. I didn't think so. You could present useful ads, but you needed to make it clear they were ads. It wasn't hard if you were willing to give up the revenue derived from deceiving users.
Larry and Sergey took the long view. Overture and the portals were training users not to click on links, because when they did, they felt cheated. It was our goal to make ads so useful that people would actually go out of their way to click them, even knowing that they were ads and not search results. To our founders, not being evil equaled sound business strategy.