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By Root 2119 0

in the search box, instead of seeing a full page of search results they would go directly to the one that would have been first on the list. Larry and Sergey were so confident in their technology that they thought the first result would provide adequate information for the majority of searches. Unfortunately, most of our users had no clue what the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button did. They let us know, however, that they liked seeing the phrase on the homepage and liked the self-assured attitude it implied. So we kept it—a small triumph for sentiment and brand building over cold, unemotional efficiency.*

In December 2000, I proposed "Go to the highest-ranked result" as the text explaining "I'm Feeling Lucky." Bay liked the way that emphasized our quality. Salar liked that it educated users about our unique method of ordering pages. Marissa thought it stank. Literally.

"Rank is a harsh-sounding word that has an alternate definition of 'bad smelling,'" she pointed out. She preferred "Go to the first result," because she wasn't sure users thought about search results as being "ranked." They more likely thought of them as "scored" or "ordered." You say tomato, I say tomahto. We ended up not implementing any rollover text at all.

I received similar pushback when I sent text to Schwim in ops for the automatic reply our system emailed to anyone who wrote us. He sent it back. With edits.

Schwim viewed himself as a sort of catcher in the rye, the last pair of hands to touch our outbound communications, and he took seriously his self-assigned duty to keep Google's brand from tumbling into the bottomless pit of mediocrity. He rewrote copy if it didn't meet the standards he felt Google should maintain. When a glaring typo mysteriously appeared overnight in an outbound email I had written, I confronted him. It hadn't been his fault. Another engineer had requested a change and introduced the error in the text. I had been copied in their online discussion, but hadn't replied, perhaps because the conversation took place at one-thirty in the morning.

Years later, Schwim explained. "We had a major product launch," he reminded me. "We weren't going home. We weren't going to bed. We wanted to give feedback and there wasn't anyone around, because surprisingly, you were sleeping." He meant it facetiously, but it was also true. The engineers weren't terribly sympathetic to the fact that I had a family at home and a life outside the office. Or that my day started at six a.m. while theirs ended then. Either you were available when they needed you or you weren't—in which case they would use their best judgment and move ahead. Nothing could stand in the way of the company's progress.

Maybe that's why Cindy kept my promotion to marketing director a secret, telling only those within our group. I'm sure it was a tough sell to Larry and Sergey to add a layer of management to the organization, even though December 2000 marked our first profitable month. What message would a director-level position in marketing send to the rest of the company? Would it indicate that marketing was gaining importance? I was doing my job and what was left of Shari's, but I wasn't writing code. I chose to view the promotion as a positive step. I had created a brand tone and put our external promotions in order. I was now the voice of Google. Cindy, at least, felt that was worthy of some recognition. As 2001 began, I looked forward to a new year of interacting with our users. My new challenge would be finding a way to answer the many, many questions they were starting to ask us.

Chapter 14

Googlebombs and Mail Fail

THE YAHOO DEAL turbo-charged Google's growth. Claus in our logs group carefully and scientifically plotted our traffic in crayon on a three-foot-tall roll of paper taped to one of the hallway walls. Significant milestones were precisely noted, with different colors signifying the components of our audience (searches on Google.com vs. searches on our partner sites like Netscape and Yahoo). Light- green foothills rolled in front of jagged dark-green peaks,