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On Tuesday morning, January
21, the world awoke to nine new words on the home page of Google Inc.,
purveyor of the most popular search engine on the Web: "New! Take your
search further. Take a Google Tour." The pitch, linked to a demo of the
site's often overlooked tools and services, stayed up for 14 days and then
disappeared. To most reasonable people, the fleeting house ad seemed
inconsequential. But imagine that you're unreasonable. For a moment, try
to think like a Google engineer -- which pretty much requires being both
insanely passionate about delivering the best search results and obsessive
about how you do that.
If you're a Google engineer, you know that those nine words comprised
about 120 bytes of data, enough to slow download time for users with
modems by 20 to 50 milliseconds. You can estimate the stress that 120
bytes, times millions of searches per minute, put on Google's 10,000
servers. On the other hand, you can also measure precisely how many
visitors took the tour, how many of those downloaded the Google Toolbar,
and how many clicked through for the first time to Google News.
This is what it's like inside Google. It is a joint founded by geeks
and run by geeks. It is a collection of 650 really smart people who are
almost frighteningly single-minded. "These are people who think they are
creating something that's the best in the world," says Peter Norvig, a
Google engineering director. "And that product is changing people's
lives."
Geeks are different from the rest of us, so it's no surprise that
they've created a different sort of company. Google is, in fact, their
dream house. It also happens to be among the best-run companies in the
technology sector. At a moment when much of business has resigned itself
to the pursuit of sameness and safety, Google proposes an almost joyous
antidote to mediocrity, a model for smart innovation in challenging times.
Google's tale is a familiar one: Two Stanford doctoral students, Sergey
Brin and Larry Page, developed a set of algorithms that in 1998 sparked a
holy-shit leap in Web-search performance. Basically, they turned search
into a popularity contest. In addition to gauging a phrase's appearance on
a Web page, as other engines did, it assessed relevance by counting the
number and importance of other pages that linked to that page.
Since then, newer search products such as Teoma and Fast have
essentially matched Google's advance. But Google remains the undisputed
search heavyweight. Google says it processes more than 150 million
searches a day -- and the true number is probably much higher than that.
Google's revenue model is notoriously tough to deconstruct: Analysts guess
that its revenue last year was anywhere from $60 million to $300 million.
But they also guess that Google made quite a bit of money.
As a result, there is constant, hopeful speculation among financiers
around an initial public offering, a deal that could be this decade's
equivalent of the 1995 Netscape IPO. A few years back, such a deal might
have valued Google at $3 billion or more. Even today, a Google offering
might fetch $1 billion.
For now, though, most of the cars in the lot outside Google's modest
offices in a Mountain View, California office park are beat-up Volvos and
Subarus, not Porsches. And while Googlers may relish their shot at
impossible wealth, they appear driven more by the quest for impossible
perfection. They want to build something that searches every bit of
information on the Web. More important, they want to deliver exactly what
the user is looking for, every time. They know that this won't ever
happen, and yet they keep at it. They also pursue a seemingly gratuitous
quest for speed: Four years ago, the average search took approximately 3
seconds. Now it's down to about 0.2 seconds. And since 0.2 is more than
zero, it's not quite fast enough.
Google understands that its two most important assets are the attention
and trust of its users. If it takes too long to deliver results or an
additional word of text on the home page is too distracting, Google risks
losing people's attention. If the search results are lousy, or if they are
compromised by advertising, it risks losing people's trust. Attention and
trust are sacrosanct.
Google also understands the capacity of the Web to leverage expertise.
Its product-engineering effort is more like an ongoing, all-hands
discussion. The site features about 10 technologies in development, many
of which may never be products per se. They are there because Google wants
to see how people react. It wants feedback and ideas. Having people in on
the game who know a lot of stuff tells you earlier whether good ideas are
good ideas that will actually work.
But what is most striking about Google is its internal consistency. It
is a beautifully considered machine, each piece seemingly true to all the
rest. The appearance of advertising on a page, for example, follows the
same rules that dictate search results or even new-product innovation.
Those rules are simple, governed by supply, demand, and democracy -- which
is more or less the logic of the Internet too.
Like its search engine, Google is a company overbuilt to be stronger
than it has to be. Its extravagance of talent allows it crucial
flexibility -- the ability to experiment, to try many things at once.
"Flexibility is expensive," says Craig Silverstein, a 30-year-old engineer
who dropped his pursuit of a Stanford PhD to become Google's first
employee. "But we think that flexibility gives you a better product. Are
we right? I think we're right. More important, that's the sort of company
I want to work for."
And the sort of company that every company can learn from. What
follows, then, is our effort to "google" Google: to search for the growth
secrets of one of the world's most exciting growth companies. Like the
logic of the search-engine itself, our search was deep and democratic. We
didn't focus on Google's big three: CEO Eric Schmidt and founders Brin and
Page. Instead, we went into the ranks and talked with the project managers
and engineers who make Google tick. Here's what we learned.
Rule Number One: The User Is in Charge
"There are people searching the Web for 'spiritual enlightenment.' "
Peter Norvig says this with such utter solemnity that it's impossible to
tell for sure whether he gets the irony. Then again, Norvig is the guy who
authored a hilarious PowerPoint translation of Lincoln's Gettysburg
Address (available at www.norvig.com), a geek classic. So maybe he's
having fun.
But he's also making a point. When someone enters a query on Google for
"spiritual enlightenment," it's not clear what he's seeking. The concept
of spiritual enlightenment means something different from what the two
words mean individually. Google has to navigate varying levels of
literality to guess at what the user really wants.
This is where Googlers live, amid semantic, visual, and technical
esoterica. Norvig is Google's director of search quality, charged with
continuously improving people's search results. Google tracks the outcome
of a huge sample of the queries that we throw at it. What percentage of
users click on the first result that Google delivers? How many users click
on something from the first page? Norvig's team members scour the data,
looking for trouble spots. Then they tweak the engine.
The cardinal rule at Google is, If you can do something that will
improve the user's experience, do it. It is a mandate in part born of
paranoia: There's always a chance that the Google destroyer is being
pieced together by two more guys in a garage. By some estimates, Google
accounts for three-quarters of all Web searches. But because it's not
perfect, being dominant isn't good enough. And the maniacal attack on
imperfection reflects a genuine belief in the primacy of the customer.
That's why Google must correctly interpret searches by Turks and Finns,
whose queries resemble complete sentences, and in Japanese, where words
run together without spaces. It has to understand not only the meanings of
individual words but also the relationships of those words to other words
and the characteristics of those words as objects on a Web page. (A page
that displays a search word in boldface or in the upper-right-hand corner,
for example, will likely rank higher than a page with the same words
displayed less prominently.)
It's why the difference between 0.3 seconds and 0.2 seconds is pretty
profound. Most searches on Google actually take less than 0.2 seconds.
That extra tenth of a second is all about the outliers: queries crammed
with unrelated words or with words that are close in meaning. The outliers
can take half a second to resolve -- and Google believes that users'
productivity begins to wane after 0.2 seconds. So its engineers find ways
to store ever-more-arcane Web-text snippets on its servers, saving the
engine the time it takes to seek out phrases when a query is made.
And it's why, most of the time, the Google home page contains exactly
37 words. "We count bytes," says Google Fellow Urs Holzle, who is on leave
from the University of California at Santa Barbara. "We count them because
our users have modems, so it costs them to download our pages."
Just as important, every new word, button, or feature amounts to an
assault on the user's attention. "We still have only one product," Holzle
says. "That's search. People come to Google to search the Web, and the
main purpose of the page is to make sure that you're not distracted from
that search. We don't show people things that they aren't interested in,
because in the long term, that will kill your business."
Google doesn't market itself in the traditional sense. Instead, it
observes, and it listens. It obsesses over search-traffic figures, and it
reads its email. In fact, 10 full-time employees do nothing but
read emails from users, distributing them to the appropriate colleagues or
responding to them themselves. "Nearly everyone has access to user
feedback," says Monika Henzinger, Google's director of research. "We all
know what the problem areas are, where users are complaining."
The upshot is that Google enjoys a unique understanding of its users --
and a unique loyalty. It has managed a remarkable feat: appealing to
tech-savvy Web addicts without alienating neophytes who type in
"amazon.com" to find . . . Amazon.com. (Yes, people really do that. Google
doesn't know why.)
"Google knows how to make geeks feel good about being geeks," says Cory
Doctorow, prominent geek, blogger, and technology propagandist. Google has
done that from the beginning, when Brin and Page basically laid open their
stunning new technology in a 1998 conference paper. They invited in the
geeks in and made them feel as if they were in on something special.
But they didn't forget to make everyone else feel special too. They
still do, by focusing relentlessly on the quality of the experience. Make
it easy. Make it fast. Make it work. And attack everything that gets in
the way of perfection.
Rule Number Two: The World Is Your R&D Lab
Paul Bausch is a 29-year-old Web developer in Corvallis, Oregon. He
works with ASP, SQL Server, Visual Basic, XML, and a host of other
geek-only technologies. He helped create Blogger, a widely used program
that helps people set up their own Web log. And in a way that's
intentionally imprecise, he's part of Google's research effort.
"Isn't this great?" exclaims Nelson Minar, a senior Google engineer.
Minar and I are fooling with Bausch's quirky creation called Google
Smackdown, where you can compare the volume of Google citations for any
two competing queries. (The New York Yankees slam the New
York Mets; war conquers peace.) Google loosed
Smackdown and other eccentric Web novelties when it released a developer's
kit last spring that lets anyone integrate Google's search engine into
their own application. The download is simple, and the license is free for
the taking.
Here's the scary bit: Basically, those developers can do whatever
they want. The only control that Google exerts is a cap of 1,000
queries per day per license to guard against an onslaught that might bring
down its servers. In most cases, Minar and his colleagues have no idea how
people use the code. "It's kind of frustrating," he concedes. "We would
love to see what they're doing."
Most companies would sooner let temps into the executive washroom than
let customers -- much less customers who can hack -- anywhere near their
core intellectual property. Google, though, grasps the power of an engaged
community. The developer's kit is a classic Trojan-horse strategy, putting
Google's engine in places that the company might not have imagined. More
important, Bausch says, opening up the technology kimono "turns the world
into Google's development team."
Sites like Smackdown, while basically toys, "are an inkling of what
Google could be used for," Minar says. "We can't predict what will happen.
But we can predict that there will be an effect on our technology and on
the way the world views us." And more likely than not, it will be
something pretty cool.
Rule Number Three: Failures Are Good. Good Failures Are Better.
In Google Labs, just two clicks away from its home page, anyone can
test-drive Google Viewer, sort of a motion-picture version of your search
results, or Voice Search, a tool that lets you phone in a query and then
see your results online. Is either ready for prime time? Not really. (Try
them out. On Voice Search, you're as likely to get someone else's results
as your own.)
But that's the point. The Labs reflect a shared ethos between Google
and its users that allows for public experimentation -- and for failure.
People understand that not everything Google puts on view will work
perfectly. They also understand that they are part of the process: They
are free to tell Google what's great, what's not, and what might work
better.
"Unlike most other companies," observes Matthew Berk, a senior analyst
at Jupiter Research, Google has said, 'We're going to try things, and some
aren't going to work. That's okay. If it doesn't work, we'll move on.' "
In the search business, failure is inevitable. It comes with the
territory. A Web search, even Google's, doesn't always give you exactly
what you want. It is imperfect, and that imperfection both allows and
requires failure. Failure is good.
But good failures are even better. Good failures have two
defining characteristics. First, says Urs Holzle, "you know why you
failed, and you have something you can apply to the next project." When
Google experimented with thumbnail pictures of actual Web pages next to
results, it saw the effect that graphical images had on download times.
That's one reason why there are so few images anywhere on Google, even in
ads.
But good failures also are fast. "Fail," Holzle says. "But fail early."
Fail before you invest more than you have to or before you needlessly
compromise your brand with a shoddy product.
Rule Number Four: Great People Can Manage Themselves
Google spends more time on hiring than on anything else. It knows this
because, like any bunch of obsessive engineers, it keeps track. It says
that it gets 1,500 résumés a day from wanna-be Googlers. Between
screening, interviewing, and assessing, it invested 87 Google people-hours
in each of the 300 or so people that it hired in 2002.
Google hires two sorts of engineers, both aimed at encouraging the art
of fast failure. First, it looks for young risk takers. "We look for
smart," says Wayne Rosing, who heads Google's engineering ranks. "Smart as
in, do they do something weird outside of work, something off the beaten
path? That translates into people who have no fear of trying difficult
projects and going outside the bounds of what they know."
But Google also hires stars, PhDs from top computer-science programs
and research labs. "It has continually managed to hire 90% of the best
search-engine people in the world," says Brian Davison, a Lehigh
University assistant professor and a top search expert himself. The PhDs
are Google's id. They are the people who know enough to shoot holes in
ideas before they go too far -- to make the failures happen faster.
The challenge is negotiating the tension between risk and caution. When
Rosing started at Google in 2001, "we had management in engineering. And
the structure was tending to tell people, No, you can't do that." So
Google got rid of the managers. Now most engineers work in teams of three,
with project leadership rotating among team members. If something isn't
right, even if it's in a product that has already gone public, teams fix
it without asking anyone.
"For a while," Rosing says, "I had 160 direct reports. No managers. It
worked because the teams knew what they had to do. That set a cultural bit
in people's heads: You are the boss. Don't wait to take the hill. Don't
wait to be managed."
And if you fail, fine. On to the next idea. "There's faith here in the
ability of smart, well-motivated people to do the right thing," Rosing
says. "Anything that gets in the way of that is evil."
Rule Number Five: If Users Come, So Will the Money
Google has no strategic-planning department. CEO Eric Schmidt hasn't
decreed which technologies his engineers should dabble in or which
products they must deliver. Innovation at Google is as democratic as the
search technology itself. The more popular an idea, the more traction it
wins, and the better its chances.
Here's how one Google service came into the world. In December 2001,
researcher Krishna Bharat posted an internal email inviting Googlers to
check out his first crack at a dynamic news service. Although Google
offered a basic headline service at the time, news was not a corporate
mandate. This was simply Bharat's idea. As a respected PhD hired away from
Compaq and a member of the company's 10-person research lab, coming up
with new ideas is basically Bharat's job.
For an early prototype, it was quite a piece of work. Bharat had built
an engine that crawled 20 news sources once an hour, automatically
delivering the most recent stories on in-demand topics -- something like a
virtual wire editor. And within Google, it got a lot of attention.
Importantly, it attracted the attention of Marissa Mayer, a young engineer
turned project manager.
Mayer connected Bharat with an engineering team. And within a month and
a half, Google had posted on its public site a beefed-up version of the
text-based demo, which is now called Google News and which features 155
sources and a search function. Within three weeks of going public, the
service was getting 70,000 users a day.
One reason Google puts its innovations on public display is to identify
failures quickly. Another reason is to find winners. For Bharat and Mayer,
those 70,000 users provided ammunition to build a case for News within
Google. "A public trial helps you go fast," Mayer says. "If it works, it
builds internal passion and fervor. It gets people thinking about the
problem."
Soon, Mayer had marshaled a handful of engineers to bulk up News. They
expanded its reach to more than 4,000 sources, updated continuously
instead of hourly. They created an engine that was robust enough to
support five times the anticipated early volume. And they prettied it up,
designing an interface that displayed hundreds of headlines and photos but
that was still easy to navigate. By September, the new News was up.
Is Google News an actual product? Not exactly. Its home page is still
labeled Beta, as are all but a few of Google's offerings. It may become a
Google fixture, it may disappear, or it may recede into Google Labs. Mayer
is still studying the traffic, and the engineers are still tweaking,
reacting to users' emails.
The company's organic approach to invention bugs some onlookers.
"Google is a great innovator," says Danny Sullivan, editor of Search
Engine Watch and an influential commentator. "They keep rolling out great
things. But Google News was an engineer deciding he wanted a news engine.
Now Google has this product, and it doesn't know how to make money off of
it."
Sullivan is onto something important: At some point, all of this great
stuff has to turn a profit. That was the one great moral of the dotcom
blowout: "Monetizing eyeballs" turned out to mean "throwing money down a
sinkhole." When Mayer argues that "the traffic will let us know" whether
News is a success, she's echoing a long line of now-unemployed executives
who thought that they had tamed the business cycle.
But at Google, building and then following the traffic makes perfect
sense. It's central to the company's culture and its operating logic.
Consider this: For the first 18 months of its existence, Google didn't
make a penny from its basic Web-search service. Only then did it make the
transition from great technology to great technology with a critical mass
of users.
And Google was able to package that traffic in ways that seem both
ingenious and completely synchronous. The search service itself remained
free. But Google has, for example, sold untold numbers of ads pegged to
specific search keywords. (Not surprisingly, Fast Company
slips in a paid ad to the side of your results whenever your query
includes fast company.)
Advertisers don't just pay a set rate, or even a cost per thousand
viewers. They bid on the search term. The more an advertiser is willing to
pay, the higher its ad will be positioned. But if the ad doesn't get
clicks, its rank will decline over time, regardless of how much has been
bid. If an ad is persistently irrelevant, Google will remove it: It's not
working for the advertiser, it's not serving users, and it's taking up
server capacity.
This is how it is at Google. Google News attracted eyeballs among
Bharat's employees, so it made the leap to the public domain. If enough
users like it, it will have real power with advertisers. And traffic for
advertisers will beget even more traffic for advertisers.
So yes, Mayer has a revenue strategy. She's had one since January 2002,
before the first version of News went public. She won't say what it is,
but if News can build enough traffic, Google almost surely will seek
advertising. It will probably resell the service to portals and other
commercial sites, just as it does with its core Web search. (Every time
you see the Google logo on a corporate site, the company is likely paying
at least $25,000 a year for a Google server.) "But we're not in a hurry,"
Mayer says. "We're focused on making News a great experience. Until we
figure out whether the product has traction, there's no rush to execute
the revenue plan."
Could it be any simpler? Build great products, and see if people use
them. If they do, then you have created value. And if you've truly done
that, then you have a business. Says Mayer: "Our motto here is, There's no
such thing as success-failure on the Net." In other words, if users win,
then Google wins. Long live democracy.
Sidebar: Just how big is Google?
That's hard to say. Officially, Google says that it processes more than
150 million searches a day, but the true number is probably much higher.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, 67.6 million people worldwide visited
Google an average of 6.2 times last December. Analysts guess that last
year's revenue was between $60 million and $300 million.
Sidebar: A Gaggle of Google Games
While tens of millions of people like Google, a disconcertingly large
minority are obsessed with it. Since 1999, techies have invested many
hours and much creativity into devising a wide range of Google-based
parlor games and curiosities. Here's a sampling, courtesy of Google and
Cameron Marlow at MIT's Media Lab.
Googlewhack Find two words which, when combined in a
Google query, deliver one and only one result. www.googlewhack.com claims
that it has recorded 120,000 whacks since January 2002. Among recent
entries to its "Whack Stack" are prevarication pileups and hiccupping
flubber. (A Fast Company original: defamatory meerkats.)
Googlebomb Geek terrorism. Taking advantage of a
Google loophole, Googlebombers gang up to mass-hyperlink a target page
with a specific (usually derogatory) phrase. Google picks up on the links,
even if the phrase isn't on the page itself. The legendary first, incited
by Adam Mathes in April 2001, tagged Mathes's friend Andy Pressman's site
with the words "talentless hack." For a while, it stuck.
Googleshare The invention of blogger Steven Berlin
Johnson. Search Google for one word. Then search those results for the
name of a person. Divide the number of results delivered for your second
search by those from the first to get that person's "semantic mindshare"
of the word.
Googlism Type in your name, someone else's name, or a
date, place, or thing at www.googlism.com. The application, written by a
team at Domain Active in Australia, uses Google to deliver Web-based
definitions of your phrase. Bill Gates, for example, is "the anti-Christ,"
"a thief," "a hero," and "a wanker."
Google Smackdown Two queries. One search engine. A
"terabyte tug-of-war," as its creator, Paul Bausch, calls it. Just plug in
two competing words or phrases at www.onfocus.com/googlesmack/down.asp,
and see which delivers more Google results. (Google, with 17.5 million,
suffers a rare embarrassment at the hands of God, with 42.6 million.)
Sidebar: How does Google keep innovating?
One big factor is the company's willingness to fail. Google engineers
are free to experiment with new features and new services and free to do
so in public. The company frequently posts early versions of new features
on the site and waits for its users to react. "We can't predict exactly
what will happen," says senior engineer Nelson Minar.
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Larry Page Sergey Brin
