I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [174]
AdSense gave Google an incentive to help grow the amount of content online. The more content on the Internet, the more potential revenue for us. Larry's idea of digitizing all printed pages suddenly became a much higher priority. We launched Project Ocean in late 2002 to begin moving the "ocean" of offline content online. That initially meant sending Googler Cari Spivak to a giant used-book sale in Phoenix, where she bought twelve thousand volumes, loaded them in a rented truck, and shipped them back to Mountain View to be scanned. Soon Google would be signing agreements with university libraries to scan all their printed materials and battling publishers and authors in court over copyrights. And Google bought Pyra Labs, a small company offering tools for anyone who wanted to create and host a blog at its site Blogger.com.*
Google's second billion-dollar idea had been much easier to implement than the first.
For Paul, the experience confirmed the power of prototyping to give definitive answers far more quickly than theoretical discussions. "Experiencing something is much more powerful than just talking about it," he reflected. "I didn't think content-targeted ads would work, really, but I thought it would be fun. I spent a few hours working on it. It wasn't that I believed in it that strongly, it's just that it was really easy." Once people saw the prototype in action they realized, whether they liked Paul's implementation or not, that content targeting could be done.
Google learned a lesson, too. Paul had put together a prototype not specifically called for by his project, just because he found it interesting. He admitted to being easily distracted and had gone off on tangents before, but usually his manager reeled him in. When he added a primitive spell checker to the product search he was building, Urs admonished him for having too many side projects and asked him to stay focused. That attitude changed after he developed the content-targeting prototype. Not just for Paul, but for the company.
"I feel like the concept of twenty-percent time came out of that," Paul told me. "I don't think it was ever specifically stated, but it was more officially endorsed after that." "Twenty-percent time" was a mandate that all those in engineering spend one day a week thinking about something other than their assigned projects. Ad targeting in email had not been assigned to anyone, and most who heard about it vehemently opposed it. Paul built it anyway, and the company's thinking shifted overnight. Other engineers had also done side projects that looked promising, like Krishna's Google news service. Larry and Sergey wanted to encourage that kind of behavior.
At first, Paul observed, APMs ambitiously tried to organize the twenty-percent time so it wouldn't be a wasted resource. "That was completely the wrong mindset," he said later. "'Oh, these engineers are working on random things. We need to coordinate them and manage it.' The real value is that people will do things that everyone thinks are a waste of time. That's where the big opportunities are. It's an opportunity because other people don't see it." Google itself was a canonical example. No other companies had thought search was important. If they had, Microsoft or Yahoo would have invested more heavily in technology and Google would never have gained such a big head start.
Overture observed our trials with content targeting. They didn't want us to have the "first mover" advantage in a new market, so in February 2003 they acted as if they had beaten us to the punch again—as they had with search-related advertising—by claiming that they