I'm Feeling Lucky (63 page)
Authors: Douglas Edwards
My children, Adam, Nathaniel, and Avalon, not only survived my frequent absences but became intelligent and accomplished beings despite my inattention. For that I thank them, as my guilt at being a negligent father is somewhat offset by their achievements. I hope that my becoming a more constant presence in their lives doesn't destroy the strong foundations upon which they have built such admirable success.
Many people deserve to be in this book but aren't. Some people are, but in a way that trivializes their contributions to Google's meteoric growth. I apologize to all who were truncated by the constraints of page limits or foreshortened because this tale is told from one marketer's perspective. You have earned recognition, and I hope this effort inspires others to publicly sing your praises.
To those Googlers and Xooglers who generously shared their time and their stories with me, I offer my deepest gratitude. Because of you, I understand more about Google now than I did when I was working in the Plex. I offer a special note of thanks to those who explained not once, not twice, but many, many times the complicated systems I still may have managed to mangle in these pages. Any such errors are clearly of my own making and not the fault of those who attempted to impart technological insights to a nontechnical mind.
Among that number are Gerald Aigner, Anurag Archarya, Mieke Bloomfield, Paul Bucheit, Orkut Buyukkotten, Bay Wei Chang, Matt Cutts, Jeff Dean, Ron Dolin, Sanjay Ghemawat, Ben Gomes, Urs Hölzle, Zain Kahn, Salar Kamangar, Ed Karrels, Deb Kelly, Keith Kleiner, Ross Konigstein, Chad Lester, Jane Manning, Amit Patel, Jim Reese, Larry Schwimmer, Ray Sidney, Craig Silverstein, Shawn Simpson, Ben Smith, Eric Veach, and Will Whitted.
Howard Gobioff would be on that list, had he not passed away in 2008. Howard was bright, funny, and full of opinions he happily shared. I respected his acumen and his principles and was saddened by the loss of his talent and his humor.
Those who provided much appreciated perspective on our business-side systems and our corporate culture include Charlie Ayers, Heather Cairns, Devin Ivester, Katina Johnson, Jim Kolotouros, David Krane, Alan Louie, Miriam Rivera, George Salah, Sheryl Sandberg, Stacy Sullivan, and Susan Wojcicki.
Sincere thanks also to Cindy McCaffrey for sticking her neck out to hire me, when clearly my academic credentials were marginal at best, and then for helping me survive in the maelstrom of daily life at Google for more than five years. It was a joy standing with her to keep the marketing fires burning while the wolves howled just outside the light. She inspired and supported me and always lived up to her promise: "My door is always open. Except when it's closed."
Larry Page and Sergey Brin must also be acknowledged here for handing me a ticket to the most amazing ride I will probably ever experience. Had they changed the way I thought about work, expanded my assessment of my own capabilities, or altered my view of global communication, it would have been enough for me. But they did all that while creating a new technology that reshaped the way everyone thinks about everything. To quote Larry, "Kewl."
To my friends Andy and Lita Unruh, Jan Kerans, and Al and Joanne Riske for enduring the teeth gnashing and mood swings while I struggled to churn out more pages, to my in-laws Maggi and Merritt for tiptoeing around the house so as not to disturb the creative process, to my siblings Jeff and Carolyn for their restraint in not asking me constantly about my progress, to Emily Wood of Google PR for scheduling interviews and shepherding me to them and Karen Wickre for her thoughtful comments and gentle encouragement to stake out my own narrative, to my agent Amy Rennert and my editors George Hodgman, Tom Bouman, and Camille Smith—to all who have helped me get this story out of my head and into print—I extend my true and heartfelt appreciation.
And to those who have read this book and are left with questions about how to get a job at Google, how to improve a site's ranking in Google results, or how to share a great idea for a new Google service, I invite you check out the same helpful resource I would use now that I've been away from the company for half a decade. You can find it at
www.Google.com
.
* In Larry's binary world, literary license was the moral equivalent of sloppy engineering. I wrote that he was on a campus tour when he met Sergey for the first time. "It was a visit weekend, not a campus tour," he corrected me. The great stories I'd heard about him sleeping under his desk while working on developing Google? Sergey setting up a business office in his dorm room? The strain on Stanford's power grid created by their Google prototype? "It didn't happen that way," Larry told me. "Take it out."
***
* The PageRank patent is actually assigned to Stanford, and the university received 1.8 million shares of Google stock for granting Google an exclusive license to use it. Larry and Sergey described the core of the technology in their 1998 paper "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," available at
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
.
***
* In 2006, the
Merc
's owner Knight Ridder was sold and its assets divided up. The
Mercury News
is now owned by MediaNews Group, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2010.
***
* Yoshka, a Leonberger, was described by engineer Ron Dolin as "a cross between a lion, a horse, and a puppy."
***
† Another Googler recalled answering interview questions on Halloween while Sergey, attired in a full-size cow suit, absentmindedly stroked his rubber udder.
***
* That was the premise of an
Outpost.com
spot.
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* Google is a play on "googol," which is the number one followed by a hundred zeroes. The nickname for our office is from "googolplex," ten raised to the power of a googol (one followed by a googol zeros).
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* Like many new Googlers, HR director Stacy Sullivan found the unlimited munchies irresistible. "The first week I couldn't believe having that much free candy. There were huge bowls of M&Ms. I ate so many I threw up."
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* According to Urs, Gerald Ainger and Larry Page did most of the work on the corkboard design. First they ran performance tests on four commercial motherboards to see which was fastest, then they worked on fitting them together. Gerald was hired in May 1999, and the first machines were in service just a month later, replacing boards that had one (much bigger) server per tray.
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* "Co-lo" for "co-location center," a building housing the computers of more than one company.
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* A different data center complained to an ops technician in 2001 that Google's cage drew more power and generated more heat than the entire rest of their operation. In 2002, engineer Amit Patel calculated Google's power usage curve and predicted, "We're going to destroy the universe in 143 years."
***
* Industry-speak for a site that was targeted to individual users and branded with a company's own name. Also referred to as a "destination site," because the owner tries to send people there.
***
† Not "branding guidelines," as we might have called them at another company. Functionality, not marketing, drove everything we did at Google.
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* Sergey did Google's original design and explained its simplicity by saying, "We didn't have a webmaster, and I don't do HTML."
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* Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg both contributed to the coding of Google's original search engine while at Stanford. Hassan later founded eGroups, a company that enabled online mailing lists. Steremberg founded Wunderground, a popular weather information website that Larry and Sergey often looked to for technical inspiration.
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* So much so that their names came to be fused as one in Google conversations and both were named Google Fellows, the company's highest honor.
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† MapReduce enabled engineers to write prototype programs much more quickly, accelerating the speed of Google's product development and systems improvements.
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* A monthly email that alerted users about new Google features.
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* Insisting on equity was common practice in Silicon Valley at the time. The landlords at Google's University Avenue office wanted a share of the company, but Larry and Sergey refused them as well.
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* "Definitely some VC groups had heartache because we had no revenue model and no projects in place for that revenue," said Salar, and "there were definitely some VCs that were less interested because of the valuation we were expecting."
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† He liked it so much he reserved the honor for exceptional Google staffers rather than well-schooled Google users.
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* The board comprised Larry, Sergey, and the venture capitalists who had put up the money to get Google off the ground: Doerr, Moritz, and Ram Shriram.
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* I'll refer to product managers as "pMs" to avoid confusion with project managers. Project managers focused entirely on the logistics required to complete specific tasks. Product managers made more strategic decisions about every aspect of a product's development.
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* Targeting means matching an ad to the trigger that causes it to be displayed: in this case, selecting ads on the basis of the keywords a user enters into Google, so the ads displayed are relevant to the actual results appearing alongside them.
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* A few months later Krispy Kreme opened its first Peninsula store less than a mile from Google—a good thing because Google's Friday donut consumption quickly rose to eighty dozen.
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* Besides "organic," names that have been applied to search results generated entirely by computer programs include: "algorithmic," "natural," and "objective."
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† From Brin and Page, "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine," Appendix A.
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* Research firm Millward Brown published a study in 1998 saying CTRs were averaging less than one percent.
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† Wacom is the maker of a stylus and sketch pad that hook up to a computer to enable freehand drawing.
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* A Silicon Valley joke: TLA stands for "three-letter acronym."
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* Noam Shazeer wrote Google's spell-checking software and designed its calculator function.
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* I felt this even more strongly the first time I visited the Google doctor, for whom the company had converted an office into a full examining room. It's unsettling to walk past the cubicles of your coworkers on your way to a physical.
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* Smith was unbeatable. He once challenged me to a game in which he used only his toes to operate the controller. He won, literally hands down.
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* Charlie always offered at least one vegetarian option for the main entrée.
***
* Vasanth Sridharan at
Businessinsider.com
, April 23, 2008.
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* A cached page is a copy that Google stores in its index when it crawls the web. It's not the live page hosted on the site itself, but more like a photo Google takes for reference. Because the cached page is hosted by Google, it's available even if the original site goes down or the content of the page changes.
***
* A term I picked up during my six-month stay in Siberia. It means "a dog's nightmare."
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* Sergey may have been referring to his own April Fools' joke, an all-staff memo announcing that the board had raised Google's stock price from $1.20 to $4.01, which led one employee to borrow money to buy his shares. The fact that Sergey sent his note on March 31 made it all the funnier—to him, anyway.