I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [123]
By the time I got to work, the TV was on in the blue conference room. A couple of engineers sat transfixed, bowls of soggy cereal untouched on the table in front of them. I sat down at the table to watch and didn't move for thirty minutes. "Oh my God," I thought. "Oh my God." I didn't think much beyond that. It didn't occur to me that there might be something I could do about what I was seeing. The disaster was on the other end of the country, three thousand miles away. I never once considered that I worked for a powerful global information service—that Google could somehow offer assistance.
Sergey walked in. He was frowning and clearly agitated. But his mind was clear. He saw problems and it never occurred to him that we could not help—that we would not help. He had been having trouble accessing online news organizations. People desperate for information had besieged them and choked their servers. He directed us all to begin downloading the HTML for news reports from whatever sources we could access. He wanted the text and the images too. He had already spoken to our webmaster Karen and to Craig, one of the few engineers who could manually push changes out to our website. We would harvest whatever pages we could and host them on www.Google.com, which was better able to handle high volumes of traffic than the New York Times or CNN.com.
No one asked whether it was within our legal rights to appropriate others' content. We didn't debate whether linking to cached news reports fit our brand, our mission, or our role as a search engine. No one argued that the links would disrupt the aesthetics of our homepage. People urgently needed information and couldn't get to it. We could help them. Clearly it was our responsibility to do so.
I realized then how much Sergey saw Google as an extension of himself. It wasn't an anonymous corporation bound by industry traditions. He had created it with Larry, and the only rules that applied were the ones they agreed upon. As William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer had imposed their personalities upon their newspapers, Larry and Sergey had imprinted Google with more than just lines of code. The difference, though, was that Google's founders used the power of their "press" to present not just their own viewpoints, but all viewpoints.
I went back to my desk and checked my inbox. "Is New York alive?" read the subject line of a note from Chad.
"Oh, Christ," I thought. That's right. Google had an office in midtown Manhattan. Eric Schmidt was supposed to be visiting there that morning. The answer came back from New York that everyone was okay. They had evacuated their office near the Empire State Building when the first plane hit. They were shaken and they were concerned about friends and family.
My brain finally unfroze, and I thought about what Sergey was trying to do. I realized it would be better to host real news content than to put up a random collection of bits downloaded from across the web. I contacted Martin Nisenholtz, head of the New York Times's online service, and asked if he wanted Google to host copies of the pages they were posting. Martin was grateful for the offer but, after checking with his webmaster, declined. They thought their servers would be able to bear the load.
Meanwhile, Karen had assembled articles from the Washington Post and CNN and put them up on a page at Google.com/currentevents. We needed a pointer from our homepage, so I jotted down a paragraph and gave it to her. It read, "If you are looking for news, you will find the most current information on TV or radio. Many online news services are not available, because of extremely high demand. Below are links to news sites, including cached copies as they appeared earlier today."
I didn't think deeply about the implications of what I had written, which would be picked apart and sniffed at in the