Authors: Douglas Edwards
My first contribution to Cindy's credibility campaign explained that principle. "Why we sell advertising, not search results," I wrote on our homepage in March 2002. The link led to a page that began, "In a world where everything seems to be for sale, why can't advertisers buy better position in our search results? The answer is simple. We believe you should be able to trust what you find using Google."
It didn't generate as much interest as our "No Pop-Ups" message, but our sales team loved it. It gave their clients a rationale for our refusal to offer pay-for-placement and detailed why that made us more ethical and more effective as an advertising medium. Our business-development team, though, had qualms about the closing: "Other online services don't believe the distinction between results and advertising is all that important. We thought you might like to know that we do." What about our partners like Yahoo? Would they view this as a swipe at them? After all, they ran Overture's ads above our search results.
It didn't help that with our Yahoo contract up for renewal, Inktomi suddenly got aggressive in attempting to win back the business, asserting that users introduced to Google on Yahoo's site would just search directly with Google in the future. Why would Yahoo let Google siphon off their audience? Inktomi even drove a mobile billboard around Yahoo's campus with the message "Do you, uh, Google? Google is stealing your users. A friendly reminder from Inktomi." We debated surreptitiously pasting the words "bringing you customers" over the phrase "stealing your users," but we decided not to legitimize our rival's feeble ploy.
Omid was not amused. He knew the perception was spreading that Google was not a friend of portal sites, especially since we were now openly seeking partners not just for search results but also for ad distribution. Sergey turned to marketing for data proving the perception false. We couldn't find any, though I spent months looking.
Our Earthlink win had cracked the icy stasis locking the search players in place. Suddenly conventional certainty was set adrift. Google had entered a new industry and won an account from a firmly ensconced leader. We had flawlessly implemented a substantial and complex advance in our back-end systems and transitioned from one economic model to another. Those accomplishments could easily have absorbed the full focus of a competent tech company for years. It was becoming clear that Google was more than just a competent tech company.
At the tail end of 2001, I had convened a group at Cindy's request to begin thinking about Google's evolving position in the marketplace. Since then, Susan, Sheryl Sandberg, Cindy, and a couple of other marketeers had gathered every few weeks to try and pin down Google's protean essence. We called our initiative "Baby Beagle," in homage to Darwin. Our corporate identity had morphed with our entry into ads syndication—but into what? We didn't want to be pegged as a portal, but we had outgrown the notion of being only a search engine.
Our group couldn't reach consensus. It was like the old story of sightless men describing an elephant by touching its leg, its trunk, its back. I needed to talk to someone who saw the whole picture. I needed to talk to Larry. The hour I spent with him and Sergey probing their vision for Google gave me my best look at their motivations and aspirations for the company. Cindy was the only other person in the room. It wasn't a press interview. They had no reason to shade their views or filter their thoughts. They expressed what they truly and deeply believed.
We spent the first fifteen minutes talking about what Google was not and what we would never do. Larry wanted Google to be "a force for good," which meant we would never conduct marketing stunts like sweepstakes, coupons, and contests, which only worked because people were stupid. Preying on people's stupidity, Larry declared, was evil.
We wouldn't mislead people like our partner Yahoo, which at the time was experimenting with a pay-for-inclusion program that sold placement in their results. Google wouldn't treat employees badly or sell products that worked poorly. We wouldn't waste people's time—a point Larry emphasized again and again.
We need to do good, he said. We need to do things that matter on a large scale. Things that are highly leveraged. When I asked for examples, he mentioned micro-credits in Bangladesh and the Rocky Mountain Institute and talked about changing business systems to make them environmentally friendly while saving money. He also talked about distributed computing, drug discovery, and making the Internet faster. And that wasn't all.
We should be known for making stuff that people can use, he said, not just for providing information. Information is too restrictive. In fact, we shouldn't be defined by a category, but by the fact that our products work—the way you know an Apple product will look nice and a Sony product will work better but cost more. We're a technology company. A Google product will work better.
We don't make promises and then break them.
If we did have a category, it would be personal information—handling information that is important to you. The places you've seen. Communications. We'll add personalization features to make Google more useful. People need to trust us with their personal information, because we have a huge amount of data now and will have much more soon.
Here his eyes took on a faraway look and his words came faster. Sensors are really cheap and getting cheaper. Storage is cheap. Cameras are cheap. People will generate enormous amounts of data.
Everything you've ever heard or seen or experienced will become searchable. Your whole life will be searchable.
Our conversation ended on that note. Not once did the subject of making money come up. Not once did he talk about advertising revenue or syndication or beating Overture or CPC or our new Search Appliance.
I was probably a naive middle-aged dreamer, because looking back at it now, I see there was nothing truly extraordinary about what Larry described. But when I walked out of his office I believed that for the first time in my life I had been in the presence of a true visionary. It wasn't just the specifics of what he saw, but the passion and conviction he conveyed that made you believe Larry would actually achieve what he described. And that when that day came, he would already be thinking another fifty years ahead. My respect for our two capricious, obstinate, provocative, and occasionally juvenile founders increased tenfold that day.
There were other glimpses of Larry's thinking. He and Eric shared a list of possible strategies that included Google as the publisher of all content, where users would pay us and we would reimburse the creators of everything from books to movies to music. Google as a provider of market research and business intelligence based on what we knew about the world. Google as an infrastructure platform and communications provider tying email and web data together. Google as the leader in machine intelligence backed by all the world's data and massive computing power that learned as it went along.
He had no small plans.
Eric, on the other hand, was the voice of corporate pragmatism. These grand schemes would have to be paid for somehow. "Any chart that goes up and to the right is good," he assured us. And, "I like to watch cash in the bank." I got the impression he shared my concern for all the things that could go wrong.
One fear I knew Eric had was of clowns. Specifically, the bozos who showed up at a company when it reached a certain size and bloated it with bureaucracy and bogged it down in mediocrity. Google's hiring guidelines explicitly stated we should only add people smarter than we were.
That's why we started running a line on the homepage that said, "You're brilliant. We're hiring." The engineers loved it.
I hated it. To me it reeked of arrogance and went counter to our "say little, do lots" brand strategy. I had opposed it when we ran it previously, but Marissa insisted the data showed it garnered more résumés than any of our other job-related lines. I got nowhere pointing out that a minuscule percentage of the people reading it on the homepage would be qualified to work at Google. Larry and Urs were willing to waste a few hundred million impressions to reach the dozen or so people they might consider hiring.
The page at the other end of the link had been written entirely by Jeff Dean. The word "exceptional" appeared three times in the first paragraph, and "problems" showed up four times in the next two sentences. I offered to smooth out the rough edges and nearly gave Wayne Rosing a heart attack.
"
No!
" he exclaimed. "Leave it alone! Please!" It was a page written for geeks, and if Jeff, our own über-geek, liked it, marketing's touch would only taint it. Cindy encouraged me not to let engineering roll over our department, so I sat down with Jeff and went through the copy line by line, making helpful suggestions. As I made the edits, Jeff said he liked most of them—then, as soon as I left, he undid them all. He knew what appealed to him and saw exactly how it would appeal to others like him.
It would be easy to assume from this anecdote that Jeff thought he was brilliant and was arrogant about it. That wasn't the case at all. In fact, Paul Bucheit told me, Jeff kept everyone humble. "You can't get up and be an asshole about being smart," Paul explained, "because Jeff's smarter than you and he's not an asshole." I think Jeff just looked at brilliance as a quantifiable asset. Since brilliance was a parameter for our search, it was best to specify that in a forthright manner.
I knew it would be pointless to keep fighting, and the page went up as written. I was learning to pick my battles.
One battle picked us. The Church of Scientology filed a complaint under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) demanding we remove links to Operation Clambake (
www.xenu.net
) from our search results. Operation Clambake, based in Norway, sought to expose what it claimed to be unethical practices within the church. The DMCA was a federal law requiring companies to remove content that an owner asserted was protected. In this case, that content included some of the church's internal documents and photographs on the Xenu website. We had no doubt the church would sue Google if we did not comply with the letter of the law and remove the references to
xenu.net
from our search results for the term "Scientology."
Ironically, while we were intent on keeping Google's internal processes private, many on our staff supported the first amendment rights of church dissenters to expose Scientology's secrets. I heard grumbling in support of those threatening to boycott Google for kowtowing to "an oppressive and censorious organization." The law was the law, however, and the DMCA was the status quo. But at Google the status quo was nothing more than an inconvenience to be improved upon as time allowed. Evidently, the time for fixing DMCA removal requests was now.
Matt Cutts led the charge. He proposed we put on our game face and drop pointed hints about how far we would go to defend our results, implying that we were committed to a more combative stance than we were actually prepared to adopt. He drafted a polite letter to his contact at the church (from whom we had received previous complaints) in which he laid out a number of paths Google might take, from publicizing that we had eliminated results at their request to letting the courts settle the issue.
Cindy was reluctant to stir the PR pot further. Larry and Sergey knew we couldn't bluff a group so famously litigious in protection of their copyrights. "Scientology will never back down," they advised Matt. "Focus on the per-search notification alerts. Figure out a way to let users know that some of our search results have been filtered."
Within a week, engineers Daniel Dulitz and Jen McGrath had come up with a solution. Any time a DMCA notice necessitated the removal of a search result, we explained that a result had been deleted and provided a link to a copy of the complaint on a website run by
ChillingEffects.org
. That way Google met its legal obligations while still letting users know what information had been removed.
Our user mail rapidly turned more positive. The
New York Times
ran an article about our innovative approach and noted that publicity about Scientology's complaint had pushed
xenu.net
to the second-highest spot in the search results for "Scientology"—just below the church's official site.
The
xenu.net
episode went a long way toward establishing our credibility with the hard-core, libertarian-leaning, free-speech army. I suspect some would have preferred Google go down in a blaze of glory, expending all our resources fighting the Scientologists in a Supreme Court smackdown, but they appeared somewhat appeased by Google's innovative way of "fighting without fighting." The outcome reinforced Larry and Sergey's optimism that there would always be a creative, technology-based solution when we got ourselves in a jam. We just had to be intelligent enough to see it, and if Google employees had anything, it was off-the-charts intelligence. Yeah, we could most definitely innovate our way out of anything.
That hubris would carry a price in years to come.
I
RAN INTO SOME
Hawaiians," I informed our executive staff in March 2002. "They said Google had the best search technology in the market." Normally I wouldn't bother Larry and Sergey with compliments passed along at a marketing conference, but "Hawaii" was our code name for America OnLine (AOL).
*
We were scrambling to win their business from Overture, and the AOL vice-president I had spoken with gave every sign of being favorably disposed toward Google.