I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [141]
GoTo's rationale was simple: the more someone paid to have an ad show up on searches for a particular keyword, the more relevant that ad was likely to be. Where we had a democracy of the web, GoTo had a dictatorship of the dollar. I found GoTo's auction-based results almost unusable. A significant number of their advertisers bid high for popular, but irrelevant, search terms just to lock in the top position on as many searches as possible. Even when the top result was not pure spam, the whole approach seemed misleading.
Ralph Nader agreed. Nader's group Commercial Alert filed a deceptive-advertising complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in July 2001 to stop the practice of "inserting advertisements in search engine results without clear and conspicuous disclosure that the ads are ads [which] may mislead search engine users to believe that search results are based on relevancy alone, not marketing ploys."* The complaint called out eight search companies, including AltaVista, AOL, iWon, and Microsoft. Google was not listed among the offenders, but news articles grouped us with companies that had no scruples about crossing the line. That bothered Larry and Sergey a lot.
Larry had thought he was done with ads after AdWords launched in September 2000. Ads were the price we had to pay for building a really cool search engine, but he viewed them as "tainted meat," according to an engineer who was in the ads group at the time. We had made ads better, but GoTo proved we hadn't completely solved the problem. Fortunately for Google, the ads engineers had not been content to leave AdWords alone. They continued to innovate because they saw the danger presented by CPC ads as life-threatening for our company. Fortunately for those engineers, Salar saw it that way too.
Chapter 19
The Sell of a New Machine
SALAR FELT HEMMED in. It was early 2001 and he was not getting his way on consumer products. As Larry's first PM, he had helped launch Google news and been involved in the rebirth of Deja.com as Google groups. But there were always too many cooks stirring those pots.
"Everybody had strong opinions about everything," he remembers, "because the consumer product was what we all lived and breathed." I understood that perspective entirely. I kept bumping into concerned parties who wanted to rewrite my copy. Salar decided it would be nice to find some area that fewer people cared about. He settled on ads and began informally working with the ads engineers.
"Larry and Sergey had the strongest views about things on the consumer side," Salar realized. "We all knew that they were less interested in the details on the ads side." Omid, on the other hand, had a deep and abiding interest in ads. As head of sales and business development, he liked having Salar involved and suggested Salar make the arrangement official. Larry agreed and named Salar product manger for ads.
Salar did his best thinking late at night. He walked the bike-lined halls of the Googleplex after dark, thinking about how ads were sold, how they were displayed, and how they could be improved. In the cubicles around him, Matt Cutts and a handful of other engineers* worked on maintaining the AdWords system.
Another team focused on ads optimization—a new system to predict which ads users were most likely to click. Predicting user behavior was an enormous technical challenge that required machines to learn in real time and then make educated guesses. Veterans Chad Lester, Ed Karrels, and Howard Gobioff were on that team,† along with Noogler Eric Bauer, whose initial project had added a hundred thousand dollars a day to Google's revenue stream by replacing low-performing ads from the original system with the best-performing AdWords ads. Their leader was a redheaded