I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [124]
The mainstream media, however, were not so quick to write off the power of Google. Within half an hour after the message went up, ABC News had asked for a link to their site. Then came MSNBC. We added them both, and in so doing exceeded the character limit for our HTML table, breaking Google's homepage. Karen and Marissa scrambled to fix it as the mood of the day swung between depression over the events, obsession with garnering every scrap of information, and stress over trying to devise more things we could do quickly to help.
We fed relevant keywords into the advertising system so that searches on topics like "World Trade Center" displayed messages linking to our news page. We prepared a link to the Red Cross to encourage blood donations, then discovered that their site had been overwhelmed and couldn't be accessed. Our engineers ran a special crawl using the new incremental indexing tool we had been building for the Yahoo deal, so searches would bring back up-to-date results from news sites.
We were soon flooded with email from well-meaning users who wanted Google to help them help others. Most of the mail was about the ad hoc news directory we had created. Requests to be added to the list of links increased with each update we pushed out. A webmaster had a site where people could post messages letting others know they were safe. A Wiccan wanted a pointer to her "online healing book." An old friend at Salon.com wanted a link to their coverage. A British user suggested we add sources outside the United States. I explained to all of them that our mission was not "to replace news services online, but to help people get info they can't get otherwise." Still, the cascade of incoming links became a cataract, roaring in concert with the rush of the news from New York and the Pentagon and Pennsylvania.
I agreed about the value of adding a global perspective, so I asked Googlers what sites they used abroad. They sent back sources in German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Romanian, Polish, Spanish, Basque, Ukrainian, Japanese, and Russian. I dutifully checked them all. Unfortunately, I couldn't read any of them, so I had no way to evaluate whether they were espousing extremism in their bold headlines or had bias buried in the tiny type below. I tried to get confirmation from at least two Googlers before passing the sites along to Karen to post. The engineering team sent me a list of the top news sites they were seeing in the search logs—an indication of what sources people around the world were trying to find. If I couldn't get validation from staff, I took search popularity as a vote for legitimacy.
As the changes rolled out throughout the day, user reaction was all over the map. Some praised us for the useful information. Others complained about the wording that directed people to their TVs. Some sniffed that it wasn't our role to act as a news provider. Some warned us that our uncluttered interface had drawn them to us in the first place and threatened to leave if we didn't clean up the homepage and lose the links.
I wondered at the parochialism of these people. Didn't they understand that something extraordinary had occurred, requiring extraordinary measures on our part? To be fair, if Sergey hadn't taken a hammer to the image of a polished and perfect brand I had carried with me to Google, I might have been confused as well. We were a corporation, a legal entity providing a product solely to earn a profit—yet here we were, acting like a well-meaning bystander attempting CPR at a car wreck. Should we maintain