I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [104]
"Sometimes we have to shut the service down to implement improvements," I wrote about an unstable product launch. "Sometimes it decides on its own to break for a nice pot of Earl Grey and some fresh silicon wafers."
I found out humor wasn't so funny when it came time to translate our FAQs into languages in which the jokes didn't work. Or when a joke wore out from overexposure. The error message I wrote for orkut, our experiment in social networking, quickly grew tired as the service crashed time and again.*
"Bad, bad server," it said. "No donut for you. We're sorry, the orkut.com server has acted out in an unexpected way. We apologize for the inconvenience and our server's lack of consideration for others."
I thought I had written an amusing tribute to an obscure half-remembered cartoon, but the page became the focus of intense user frustration. A Google search for "bad, bad server" still brings up close to ten thousand results, most of them rants about connectivity problems.
Despite the occasional misfire, I knew I had found my stride. I was increasingly aware that Google was developing a voice and increasingly confident in my ability to speak with it, not just to users, but to those working inside the Googleplex as well.
In November 2000, almost a year to the day after I started at Google, I wrote two lines that defined for me exactly what Google should be as a new kind of corporate entity—two lines that distilled the essence of the company I wanted to be part of and believed I had joined. It was the click of a tumbler falling into place, securing my role and locking in the sound of Google's voice once and for all. It was good timing, because Google was adding new people every day. They brought fresh energy and ideas, but with new blood the complexion of the company couldn't help changing.
Chapter 13
Not the Usual Yada Yada
I WAS AT LUNCH," said Allegra Tudisco, the new marketing coordinator I'd hired in September, "and I introduced myself to everyone at the table. They all gave me their names except this one guy, who seemed kind of shy. I asked him who he was and he said his name was Larry, so I asked him what he did. And he said he was Larry Page, the CEO. I had no idea."
Google had reached a cultural milestone. The company had grown so large that Larry and Sergey no longer had time to interview each hire personally. That proved a problem for Larry a week later when he visited our new nine-person office in New York. They refused to let him in because they didn't believe he was who he claimed to be.
Mostly, however, the growth meant we had more going on. More work on infrastructure, more deals in negotiation, more salespeople calling on clients, and more products in development. One of those products was a toolbar that tucked a search box right into users' browsers, enabling them to conduct Google searches without going to Google.com. The product had been worked on by Joel Spolsky, a contract developer, based on prototypes developed by my UI team colleague Bay Chang. Googler David Watson created the first working version, and Eric Fredricksen finalized the software we actually launched. Larry was very keen to get it out the door.
The Google toolbar came with more than just a search box. It had "advanced features." One displayed a green bar with a relative length approximating the PageRank of the web page the user was visiting. PageRank was Google's assessment of the importance of a page, determined by looking at the importance of the sites that linked to it. So, knowing a page's PageRank could give you a feel for whether or not Google viewed a site as reliable. It was just the sort of geeky feature engineers loved, because it provided an objective data point from which to form an opinion. All happiness and joy. Except that when the