I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [133]
Shortly after 9/11, Larry granted Marissa's request to join the product management (PM) team. He put her in charge of the user experience on Google.com—the consumer-facing part of our business and the basis for our brand. Marissa had been acting as the UI lead for some time, but now it was official. Her move to the product side raised some eyebrows, because it meant abdicating her engineering birthright, a sacrifice akin to giving up citizenship in the Roman Empire to become a Thracian slave. It also meant she would be reporting to Larry.
In the end, Marissa's move worked brilliantly for her. Product management gave her a far wider playing field than she ever would have had as an individual contributor in engineering. She became the disciple spreading the word of Larry, a word often passed to her in conversations restricted to the two of them, making it difficult to know where Larry's dictates ended and Marissa's interpretation began. Larry rarely refuted Marissa's directives, though, so eventually we came to believe that the gospel she preached was if not true to its source, at least not antithetical to it.
Cataloging Our Issues
To the casual observer, Project Hedwig was a weird and random product, a tool for searching mail-order catalogs that enabled users to call up images of printed pages online. Enter "blue baby doll t-shirt" and up popped a page from the Gap's merchandise flyer. Not terribly useful, important, or urgently needed. But Hedwig had a secret agenda. Larry wanted to prove it was possible to digitize every page ever printed.
Catalogs were readily available. They cost nothing. They could be easily scanned, since no one cared if they were damaged in the process. And perhaps most important, their publishers wouldn't object to having their copyrighted material reproduced. What merchant would complain about reaching a raft of potential new customers without paying for paper, ink, or a government employee to stuff their mailboxes? That was the theory anyway.
In October 2001, Pearl Renaker, a newly hired PM, began asking Googlers to bring her all the catalogs we received in the mail. Within a couple of weeks, the engineers had built a prototype for internal testing. The results were less than spectacular. A search for toys yielded no results for anything I might want to buy my kids. There were, however, plenty of toys for puppies and very, very naughty grown-ups.
I asked Marissa if there would be a porn filter in place when our catalog search launched, and if so, if it would be on by default. I pictured kids using catalog search to build their Christmas gift lists, and the picture was not a pretty one. Google did not automatically turn on its full-strength SafeSearch filter for normal web searches, but we did use a milder filter by default for image searches. Marissa and I approached the issue from different perspectives.
Marissa argued that our handling of objectionable content needed to be consistent across all the services we offered, and that if users hadn't turned on the SafeSearch filter for their Google web searches, we shouldn't assume they would want it on for catalogs. We should honor the users' preferences, even if the users had done nothing to actively express them.
Image search, Marissa reminded me, was a special case, because the odds of getting porn on an average image search were almost seventy percent. She didn't object to turning on that same mild filtering for catalogs, but it would be an engineering nightmare to have the full SafeSearch in place for our new service if a user had previously left it off for regular Google searches.
Her point made total sense from an engineering perspective and would be logical to a sophisticated user who knew how to turn filters on or off. As usual, though, I went immediately to the worst-case scenario. What would happen if we served pictures of dildos to first graders?