I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [166]
We let free-search sites put a Google search box on their pages, but they couldn't run ads around the Google results. Only we could do that. We provided them with search service for free, and in exchange we kept the revenue generated by their users. Hardly controversial, but rolling out the new pay-for-placement test might be, so Larry and Sergey decided to show the ads to one percent of users for half an hour in the middle of the night—just long enough to gather some data on how much revenue they might generate.
We had made no commitment to actually implement such a system, and clearly there was no way in hell we'd ever actually do this on our own Google.com results pages. Marissa had a bad feeling, though, and expressed her concern that our test would be noticed and brought to the attention of the press. The only way that would be likely to happen was if the pay-for-placement ads ran on Google.com itself, which was not the plan. But things didn't go according to plan.
The paid-placement ads began showing up in Google's own search results. There was a bug in GWS, Google's web server, and it caused the ads to spread outside the limited test zone. Webmasters whose livelihoods increasingly depended on reading the entrails of Google's ranking system couldn't miss such a significant change. We stuck by our explanation that a bug had unintentionally caused the test of a partner interface to appear on our own results pages.
Engineer Howard Gobioff later let me know that there were other instances when engineering was instructed to code ads into search results. I never saw them because, according to Howard, "someone always cared enough to make noise." He laid the blame at the feet of new PMs and business-development folks who argued that what we did on partner sites didn't matter and that, besides, the ads would still be marked as paid placements.
Howard said the engineers required to write the code buried some editorial commentary in its internal documentation. "This is evil but they made me do it," one engineer wrote. In Howard's opinion, the idea finally died because Sergey decided that it crossed into an ethically gray area and wouldn't play well in the press. We were willing to walk up to the edge of evil to get a closer look, but ultimately, Larry and Sergey were unwilling to cross certain lines. "Don't be evil" is not the same as "Don't consider, test, and evaluate evil."
Yippee! Yahoo!
On Friday, May 10, we celebrated the AOL deal with another company-wide luau catered by Charlie. Our executive team showed up in grass skirts. AOL sent over a giant blue lava lamp with their logo on it. Devin Ivester created a commemorative t-shirt with a traditional Hawaiian motif, but Larry made him change one element in the design: he insisted Devin remove the date. Larry didn't want anyone walking around wearing a reminder of when our AOL contract would be up for renewal.
Two months later, we took Ask Jeeves away from Overture. Overture CEO Ted Meisel remarked to the Associated Press, "We are still winning more deals than we are losing and I think we are winning all the right ones."* Now Overture had backhanded both AOL and Ask Jeeves. Not the way to make or keep friends.
Analyst Safa Rashtchy declared that the battle for audience share was over and that "Yahoo would probably accurately claim that they won, with something like 200 million worldwide users."† Yahoo must have felt far enough in the lead to keep working with us. In November 2002, they renewed their contract with Google. In fact, they expanded Google's presence, making us the primary source of their search results