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As far as I know, no one outside Google had requested that we mine the logs, though news reports indicated that the government had installed Carnivore machines (computers that can monitor Internet communications) at a few ISPs to track conversations across the web in real time. Reports also said the government was searching ISP logs for traffic from a specific email address. The Bush administration's interest in Internet chatter had expanded exponentially overnight.

I had no qualms about helping with Sergey's search effort. No one knew if there were other terrorist cells waiting to attack and if so, where they would strike. If we could provide information that might save lives, we had a moral obligation to do so. The cost in terms of potential loss of privacy seemed negligible, given how constrained our parameters were. We would only try to identify individuals who had displayed, before 9/11, a suspicious interest in topics clearly related to the hijackings.

Still, there was no way to avoid the fact that we were trying to sift out specific users on the basis of their searches. If we found them, we would try to determine their personal information from the data about them in our logs. I think about that when I hear debates over Internet privacy. The "Yada Yada" wording I wrote for the Toolbar had been my first encounter with potential issues of user privacy. This was the second. The debate over user data was not one we had actively engaged internally or with our users, and I worried that it would escalate into a potentially devastating communications issue for us. I resolved to find a way to defuse it—once life returned to some semblance of normality.

The search of our logs for the 9/11 terrorists turned up nothing of interest. The closest we came was a cookie that had searched for both "world trade center" and "Egypt air hijack." If the terrorists had used Google to plan their attack, they had done so in a way that we couldn't discover.

I turned my attention to our burgeoning News and Resources page, which had grown kudzu-like into a long list of links to news sources and relief organizations. It had been visited more than four hundred thousand times the day after the attacks. My charge was to keep it current, which quickly became a politically sensitive role. One of our VCs asked us to add a donation site run by a company he backed. One of our salespeople had a client that covered technology. News organizations from around the world beseeched us to be added. I had no set criteria by which to determine who was link-worthy and who was not, so I winged it, checking with Cindy on submissions that I felt could go either way or might have PR ramifications. Users requested news sources in the Middle East and Africa. And Canada. I had neglected our neighbors to the north and they felt under-appreciated. I added the CBC and English-language news services from Arab and African sources. I reminded everyone that the page was a temporary service and "not intended to become a permanent feature of our site." They didn't seem to care.

All week, we walked a fine line through a new set of circumstances, unsure of what our next step should be. It was an instance where we couldn't run user testing or rely on data we had in-house. We had to go with our instincts. Eric forbade unnecessary travel, and we cancelled the launch of a group of international Google sites because Afghanistan was one of the included domains. Eric also cautioned us to be particularly sensitive when interacting with angry users, given the tenor of the times. We did not take his warning lightly. One user, irate about the results returned when he searched for his own name, threatened to show up at our office and "do a Rainbow 6 on Google's front door."* I put our local police in touch with him. Another user, upset about our caching of his copyrighted photos, berated us on the phone with an irrational, profanity-laden tirade. The photos in question were grainy amateur shots of his cat that he had posted online. And so it went. In the days after 9/11, we couldn't