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Meanwhile, I continued to struggle with the tone of our communication to users. On the Monday after 9/11, a Boston University graduate named Alon Cohen emailed us a small image and asked if we would put it on our homepage. It was a red, white, and blue looped ribbon, and it was exactly what I wanted. It wasn't generic, gaudy, or cartoonish, and it didn't shout, "Look at us! We're patriots!" It was simple and tasteful and conveyed respect. I sent it to Karen and asked her opinion. She liked it, so I took it to Larry and Sergey. We posted the ribbon that day—on the homepage—with a link to the condolence message we had put up the week before. Almost immediately an offended user complained because we hadn't used "a real American flag," claiming our ribbon had a "politically correct stench." He was harsher than most, but hardly alone in demanding we display more overt patriotism.

An ad rep in our New York office asked to create Google t-shirts with a stars-and-stripes version of our logo. He wanted to give them to all our clients. His colleagues loved the idea, but it put me once again in the position of saying, "Whoa, Horsey."

"We've been careful with the site itself not to cross the boundary between showing support and calling attention to the fact that we're doing that as a company called Google," I explained in a note to him. "I think this might cross that line by literally wrapping us in the flag." The thought crossed my mind that brand management was all about knowing what you needed to "no." The bigger we grew, the greater the forces buffeting our brand and the more powerful the currents causing us to drift from the anchor of our strategy. Without constant care, the trust we had built with the public would crash against the rocks. I based my decisions on experience, intuition, customer contacts, staff discussions, founder feedback, and my own developing sense of what was "Googley." But I was basically guessing.

On 9/11, the whole world shifted. Old rules no longer applied. Except at Google, where the post-attack anarchy more clearly exposed our normal modus operandi: Larry and Sergey did what they thought was right and the Google brand tagged along for the ride. I ran after our lead-off hitters, always a step slow and a base behind. As soon as I adopted a position I thought they had declared inviolate ("Google only does search"), Larry and Sergey raced on ("Now we do news, too"). I tried pointing us back toward familiar turf by proposing a timeline for phasing out the news page.

"We should return to our normal homepage on Monday, September 24," I recommended. "The longer we wait, the more awkward it will be to remove the ribbon and the link, because when we do, people will say it means we no longer care." The natural flow of news would ebb after the second week, I thought. That was the nature of disasters and the public's attention span. Users would understand our return to business as usual. Besides, we were now crawling news sites on a more frequent basis and including that information in Google searches. We could point people to that service instead.

Larry rejected my plan. Our news search didn't work well enough to use it as a substitute, he said. Sergey believed the United States would attack Afghanistan within a week, and the news page would once again be valuable. Reporters let Cindy know that they loved it, too. And so it stayed, and I went back to tending my little garden of links.

By October 3, it seemed reasonable to start running promotional messages on our homepage again. Promotion lines brought in advertisers and drove use of our services, but we had stopped displaying them on 9/11. If we put the ribbon and the memorial link next to the promotion line, they would look like ads. I recommended that we move them to the bottom of the page, where they would feel slightly asymmetrical and thus temporary, making it easier to remove them in the future. Larry thought it would just make the jobs and corporate info links already at the bottom of the page