I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [154]
We had so carefully distinguished ourselves from the evil diminishers of search integrity, and all for naught. Cindy jumped on the AP to issue a correction, and they did, but she also reconsidered her original decision not to issue a press release about AdWords Select. She maintained a reporter-centric PR strategy of close communication with key journalists rather than "press-releasing" every burp, hiccup, and sneeze happening at the company. The strategy worked fantastically well most of the time, but when a reporter got a big story wrong, there was no official Google version to contradict it. Cindy and PR manager David Krane filed copy at two a.m. with the PR Newswire, saying, "Google's unbiased search results continue to be produced through a fully automated process and are unaffected by payment."
The AP story had been a fluke, an anomaly in a pattern of favorable press, but Cindy knew things would change. No one stayed beloved forever. Two days later she began formulating a "credibility campaign" to emphasize that not all search companies were created equal. We would use our own site to present our unfiltered messages in coordination with op-ed pieces in newspapers and executive speeches to select audiences.
"I want to kill the perception that we're selling our search results ASAP," she told us. "Our brand has been injured and we need to fix it. We're Google! Let's be outrageous and daring and have some fun with this."
Feelings ran deep on the subject of paid placement. When the topic of Google's refusal to sell placement came up on the geek bulletin board Slashdot, the first posted response was "I swear I want to make love to this company."
A self-identified Overture employee didn't share those warm and fuzzy feelings. "As for the claim by Google that they are pure," he asked plaintively, "why are they getting into the ad search business?" His implication seemed to be that the whole business was tainted. I didn't think so. You could present useful ads, but you needed to make it clear they were ads. It wasn't hard if you were willing to give up the revenue derived from deceiving users.
Larry and Sergey took the long view. Overture and the portals were training users not to click on links, because when they did, they felt cheated. It was our goal to make ads so useful that people would actually go out of their way to click them, even knowing that they were ads and not search results. To our founders, not being evil equaled sound business strategy.
My first contribution to Cindy's credibility campaign explained that principle. "Why we sell advertising, not search results," I wrote on our homepage in March 2002. The link led to a page that began, "In a world where everything seems to be for sale, why can't advertisers buy better position in our search results? The answer is simple. We believe you should be able to trust what you find using Google."
It didn't generate as much interest as our "No Pop-Ups" message, but our sales team loved it. It gave their clients a rationale for our refusal to offer pay-for-placement and detailed why that made us more ethical and more effective as an advertising medium. Our business-development team, though, had qualms about the closing: "Other online services don't believe the distinction between results and advertising is all that important. We thought you might like to know that we do." What about our partners like Yahoo? Would they view this as a swipe at them? After all, they ran Overture's ads above our search results.
It didn't help that with our Yahoo contract up for renewal, Inktomi suddenly got aggressive in attempting to win back the business, asserting that users introduced to Google on Yahoo's site would just search directly with Google in the future. Why would Yahoo let Google siphon off their audience? Inktomi even drove a mobile billboard