I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [16]
"The founders were okay with a loose shag bag of marketing folks who were at the ready to execute on their whims," Cindy told me, "but a real marketing department with a VP, proper organization, funding, and a strategy was not a priority." As a result, our world was without form and confusion was on the faces of those who dwelled within it.
"Who's working on our letterhead?" I asked Cindy. "Who handles sponsorship requests?" Were these areas that fell into my domain? I was seeking more than organizational clarity. I wanted to be sure that there was some substance to my job, something I could cling to when people asked, as they inevitably would, "What exactly do you do here?"
"No structure, foundation, or control," is how Heather Cairns, Google's HR lead at the time, remembers the company's early days. "Even if someone had a manager, that manager was inexperienced and provided no leadership. People weren't used to authority and wouldn't adhere to it—it was a completely unmanaged workforce that was bouncing off the walls like a tornado. I didn't pretend to have any control over it ... I just went home at night to drink, thinking, 'We're gonna crash and burn.'"
Keeping It Clean
"Our site is kind of a mess," Cindy said to Karen and me my second week on the job. "Can you work up some guidelines to clean it up?"
We had no rules governing what went on Google.com. Something new launched, it got mentioned on the homepage. We won an award, that went up too. Our other pages were equally devoid of planning and design. There were job listings, some help content, contact information, and brief profiles of the executive team. As with everything else at the company, our user interface (UI: the look and feel of our website) operated on the principle that we should minimize the time it took for users to find what they wanted.
Unlike Yahoo.
Yahoo's homepage had links to apparel, computers, DVDs, travel, TV listings, weather, games, yellow pages, stock quotes, and chat. It got busier with every passing day. The most prominent feature on the page was Yahoo's hand-built directory with its fourteen major categories from Arts & Humanities to Society & Culture, beneath which were links to all known points in the Dewey decimal system. Buried in the middle of all the text links was a search box powered by our nemesis Inktomi.
Inktomi hadn't always owned that space. AltaVista had provided search to Yahoo until 1998, but they made the fatal mistake of building their own portal site and stealing users from their customer (competing with your own distributor is known as "channel conflict"). Inktomi had no "consumer-facing" search site,* so they weren't Yahoo's competitors, which also gave them a clear shot at Microsoft's MSN network and America Online (AOL). Inktomi locked those customers up as well, completing their trifecta of high-traffic Internet sites and ensuring that the state of search across the web was commoditized. You could get any flavor of search you wanted, as long as it was Inktomi. They owned the search market and sat on it as fat and happy as the enormous customers they served.
Other portals wanted a piece of Yahoo's traffic: Excite, Lycos, and Disney's Go.com. And other search companies, like AlltheWeb, Teoma, and HotBot, fought alongside Google for the crumbs falling from Inktomi's table. While Wall Street focused on the portal wars, the struggle for search domination wasn't of much interest to anyone but a handful of analysts. There was no money in it. Well, not much money.
In February 1998, a small Pasadena company named GoTo started auctioning placement in search results they bought from other providers. Six months later, they claimed to have more than a thousand paying customers. According to GoTo, you didn't need fancy algorithms to determine relevance, just the invisible hand of the free market. Any company bidding for placement at the top of the results must be