I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [165]
Despite the sexist overtones, the Honeyplex name fit, as the building was a hive of nonstop revenue generation that paid for more machines, more engineers, and more AdWords reps to harvest the sweet bounty of our collective labors. The revenue engine driving Google's profits now hummed with a power equal to the search technology behind the growth of its user base.
Advertisers began finding us by word of mouth, so AdWords reps shifted from approving ads (a process that was increasingly automated) to persuading advertisers to spend more with us. Once they were in the system, Sheryl's organization—divided into tiers based on the budgets of the advertisers they served—assigned optimizers to improve performance. AdWords reps suggested more relevant keywords, set up multiple accounts for different product lines, and helped advertisers improve the sites linked to by their ads. Our AdWords reps didn't acquire customers, they just showed the ones we had how to make more money for themselves and for Google. By the time Sheryl left in 2008 (to become chief operating officer at Facebook), the AdWords group had grown from four people to four thousand, with most of the ad approvers stationed at offices in India and Dublin.
By winning AOL, Google had proved beyond a doubt the superiority of our ad-ranking technology and the value of maintaining a clear separation between ads and search results. So what happened next surprised everyone, including me.
We Walk the Line and Make a Misstep
"Is this new?" asked KeyMaster, a poster on the WebmasterWorld bulletin board. "Usually, ads are placed on the top of the search result page or boxed on the right side of the page. Now I see ads mixed in with the other search results."* KeyMaster was correct. For some users, on May 9, 2002, a Google search returned a paid listing embedded in our supposedly objective results. The paid listing was identified with the label "sponsored link," but it was the first time Google had displayed ads directly in line with regular results. It was essentially a form of paid placement, the exact practice Google had railed against so vehemently when it profited others.
By four a.m., a Google engineer using Matt Cutts' nom de plume, "GoogleGuy," had reassured the group: "This is a bug. Our new ad-distribution code had a flaw. It is mostly fixed already. It should be completely gone soon."
Not everyone was convinced. A poster named 4crests replied, "There is nothing like this anywhere else that it could have been confused with ... was it a bug or a test run? Or is it something that is going to be served up to another search engine soon?"
Several other posters accepted the idea that Google was testing an interface for AOL and somehow it had slipped out onto Google itself. They weren't far off, but it wasn't AOL Google was conducting experiments for. It was Yahoo.
While our primary battle at AOL had been against Overture to provide advertising, we had also unseated Inktomi to provide AOL's actual search results. Inktomi wasn't ready to cede us the entire search market, however. Before taking AOL from them we had taken Yahoo, and they intended to win Yahoo back when their contract came up for renewal in June.
To Sergey's deepening frustration, I had been unsuccessful in finding third-party metrics to prove that adding Google search helped grow a partner's traffic. Without data to refute Inktomi's claim that we were stealing Yahoo's users, we had to look for other ways to show our value. Perhaps we could provide unique new sources of revenue? Inktomi