I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [176]
I didn't want to go to MIT.
My squabbles with Marissa over user-interface issues had ebbed and flowed, with the launch of Google news in September 2002 bringing both high points and lows. Marissa took particular pride in Google news, which automatically scanned thousands of news sources and extracted the ones that seemed most important. Krishna Bharat had started it as a side project, and after 9/11 had worked on it in earnest. Marissa made sure that Google news, like a favored child, moved to the front of the line for whatever goodies the company doled out. One of those was positioning as a tab right above the search box on the Google.com homepage. When the UI team questioned why we hadn't met to discuss such a major change, Marissa asserted it had always been planned that way.
It was hard to miss the shift in decision-making authority away from the UI team, where all members ostensibly had equal votes, to the product team, over which Marissa now held sway.
I saw it firsthand in working with Marissa on the language our site would use to describe Google news. As was often the case, the wording was still being finalized the night before the product launch. Marissa wanted to emphasize the automated nature of Google news by saying, "No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page." To me it sounded awkward and, worse, like a slap in the face to the journalists and editors whose stories we would be aggregating. I heard its tone as implying, "Look! We've built a machine that does your job better than you! You're not needed anymore, so why don't you take your Pulitzers and Polks and put yourselves out to pasture?"
Marissa didn't hear it that way. She found the reference to animal testing irresistibly humorous, though I pointed out to her that no humans were harmed in the creation of a printed newspaper either. "It's amusing," I conceded, though I didn't really believe it, "but it's going to wear thin very quickly. A lot of folks won't get it at all."
It all balanced out, though. Marissa was equally unhappy with the language I had written into the FAQ explaining Google news: "Google news is highly unusual in that it offers a news service compiled solely by computer algorithms without human intervention. Google employs no editors, managing editors, executive editors, or other ink-stained wretches."
She grimaced at "ink-stained wretches," a phrase I knew, from my seven years working at a newspaper, was a term of endearment among journalists. "It's a badge of honor," I assured her, "a tip of the hat to them to show we're on their side."
She polled the engineering team working on news, and they all hated it. Schwim, the ops guy, chimed in that he found it insulting. When the first iteration of Google news rolled out the next morning, "ink-stained wretches" was out and "no humans harmed" was in.
The "no humans harmed" line got noticed by the press. Some of the attention was positive, some not. Almost all the news reports I saw categorized the statement as boastful. Some also referred to the suffering of "ink-stained editors" who now would find their jobs threatened. I didn't point out that our critics had applied the "ink-stained" appellation to themselves without our prompting. Even years later, the line, which only stayed up a couple of weeks, is well remembered by journalists. When Google news began experimenting with adding human editors in June 2010, Phil Bronstein of the San Francisco Chronicle noted that our "no humans harmed" wording had "never made those of us who are, for the most part, human editors feel all that great."*
I can't honestly