I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [172]
Our work lives were too full of threats and opportunities to waste resources on bureaucratic redundancy. During the dog days of summer in 2002, we were juggling a dozen chain saws.
The Chinese government unexpectedly blocked our search results, as they had done once before in the spring of 2001. We didn't know why, exactly, but suddenly we had thousands of emails in Mandarin asking about other ways to access Google. Then the block was dropped. No reason was given. Eric had discussed getting Al Gore to mediate with the Chinese, but I don't think that actually happened. At least I didn't hear him talking about it outside my office door.
We set up a program called Google Grants to provide free AdWords ads to nonprofits. I had proposed a simple public service advertising (PSA) program months before and worked on the user interface, but Sheryl Sandberg was the one who crystallized the idea and brought it to life.
We fought a trademark lawsuit over a company using our name for its online store. I was deposed. I had never given a deposition before and had to be coached on how to approach it. I spent days learning not to answer any question I wasn't asked and to ask for the definition of any term that was ambiguous. I perversely enjoyed my four hours of sweating in front of a video camera sparring with the opposing attorney.
"Did you communicate this verbally?" he asked.
Pause. Think. "Can you define what you mean by, 'verbally,' please?"
"Verbally! You know! Did you talk to him?" The attorney's frustration was audible.
"Well." Pause. "My understanding of, 'verbally' is that it means, 'expressed in words.'" Pause. "That can mean in writing. Or it can mean by speaking." Pause. "Did you mean, 'orally'?"
We won that case. Our attorney Kulpreet was so happy with my Forrest Gump impression that he recommended me for a peer bonus—a thousand-dollar award any employee could receive for helping another department in its hour of need.
As our network of ad-syndication sites grew from Earthlink and AOL to include Ask Jeeves and the New York Times website, we needed branding guidelines to tell each new partner how to display our search results and our ads and where to put our logo. Creating them turned out to be complicated and time consuming, especially after we won the ad contract for InfoSpace from Overture. InfoSpace ran a number of metasearch sites, which included Google search results alongside those of other search engines. The deal was a big bite out of Overture's revenue, but we didn't want our brand to become just another generic ingredient in a salmagundi of results. I wouldn't allow InfoSpace to put our logo in their ads with all the other search engines, even after they had paid stiff penalties to Overture to break the exclusivity clause in their advertising contract with them.* The sales team backed me up but made me go to dinner with "the client" so InfoSpace could tell me how wrong I was. I didn't eat much, and swallowed less.
But the main thing Sergey was focused on that summer was finding a billion dollars. CPC AdWords was an unqualified success. It gave every indication it would pump dollars into our bank account for many years to come. That worried Sergey. Someone, somewhere, was undoubtedly watching that cash flow and working to come up with a new development that would make our search ads obsolete. If that happened, Google would end up a bit player in the Internet economy. We needed, Sergey believed, to uncover another billion-dollar business idea and launch it quickly. Larry agreed wholeheartedly, his paranoia