I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [129]
Forget the ribbon and the promotion line, Larry commanded. Put up a news headline instead.
"Not so fast," Urs responded. "Are we now a news site? Are we competing with CNN? Why do we have a news headlines on our front page? I can see the point for a one-time event like 9/11, but I don't see the point of doing it now. Can someone explain the rationale?"
The company split on the question. Karen felt it pushed us dangerously close to becoming a portal. Marissa thought we should hold off until we could do news "right" by implementing the automated news service that engineer Krishna Bharat was building. Cindy was still getting smiley-faced comments about the page from her press contacts and wanted to keep it. I argued that portals like Yahoo had dedicated teams that managed news better than Karen and I could do on our own. Our page, to use one of Cindy's favorite phrases that always made me wince, "was Mickey Mouse."
Salar sided with us dissenters. "Do we intend to update the latest news about the war as it goes on?" he asked. "Aren't we setting user expectations and doing a poor job of meeting them?" Salar sounded persuasive, especially when Omid joined our chorus of naysayers. It was a typical Google decision-making episode—input from everywhere thrown into the hopper to be processed by the founders. I tossed in one last point I thought would cinch the deal: only a small percentage of people who saw the news link clicked on it. The use of the valuable homepage space was clearly inefficient.
None of it mattered in the end, because one of the people clicking on the homepage link was Sergey. "As a user, I just want to see what is going on in the world using a few top sites," he told us. "I don't see any rush to get rid of this with U.S. attacks and potential terrorist retaliation."
Sergey found it useful, so it was useful. That was also typical of the way decisions were made. The news link went up and the ribbon came down. For days, then weeks, then months, I cultivated our news page to keep it current—adding links to the Department of Defense, the White House, and breaking news about Pakistan, Afghanistan, anthrax, and the Quran. I checked out African, Asian, and European news reports, the CDC, the FDA, the CIA, and the UN. It made me feel amazingly well informed. I became besotted with my editorial power over a page seen by thousands of people every day. Well, slightly tipsy maybe. It was, after all, just a pile of links, the online equivalent of a mix tape.
One day Cindy asked for the rationale behind which links I accepted and which I rejected. I explained that my decisions were based on the value each site provided to the balance of news already represented. Did it offer a different perspective? Did it reach an audience not already served? How long was its name? Would it fit in the space allocated? Or would it cause my tidy columns to grow raggedy and aesthetically displeasing? In other words, my decisions were completely subjective. Cindy advised me that there were ramifications for the PR team when we left someone out. I needed to be more inclusive and make decisions faster, because reporters who were kept waiting got cranky and their coverage of us might reflect that.
Meanwhile, Krishna had been tinkering with his news-search program, and in November we added a link to a cluster of articles its algorithm selected—the first version of what ultimately became Google News. That day foreshadowed the obsolescence of my hand-picked list of links. Krishna's algorithms could sort much more information, do it much more quickly, and deliver actual stories of relevance instead of pointers to front pages. His breakthrough had the unfortunate side effect of making it harder for newspapers to sell their printed products. My link-list page would be just the first casualty of the automated aggregation of online news. In mid-2003, we took it down for good.
There was one other coda to 9/11. As we approached the first anniversary of