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"Oh," I said unthinkingly as she maneuvered the heavy hot iron around a collar, "I was in meetings all day. What would you do on your own in Milan? You'd just be bored."

It's a testament to my wife's generous character that I'm still alive to tell that tale.

I would go to Japan again for Google, and to China, but there was too much going on in Mountain View to make constant globe-hopping feasible. I had branding guidelines to work out for new partners and language to draft for new products and site tours and newsletters. And I wanted to spend the credibility capital I had earned from Froogle. I decided to invest some of it to promote my ideas about the consumer brand we were building and how it should evolve.

Chapter 24

Don't Let Marketing Drive

NO, DAD," I told my father as I watched pop-up ads spread across his screen, obscuring Google's homepage. "Google's not doing that. You've downloaded something you shouldn't have." I spent the next two hours of my vacation cleaning parasite programs off his computer.

Scumware was back. The malicious software that launched a thousand pop-up ads had never really gone away, but as 2003 began Googlers became increasingly alarmed by the proliferation of new mutant forms across the Internet. Matt Cutts, who dealt with the dark arts of the web every day in his battles against porn and spam, had reached a boiling point. On a visit to Omaha, Matt had spent an entire day cleaning scumware off his mother-in-law's PC. When he got back, his own computer had been infected. Worst of all, the company distributing the scumware afflicting him turned out to be a partner in Google's new syndicated-ads network. We were sending them ads to show on their website and then paying them every time someone clicked on one. We were bankrolling their scummy behavior. Matt and I were not the only ones enraged.

"I'd love to file a lawsuit and have a head on a pike," Matt recalls Larry saying about scumware creators and distributors. Matt's proposed solution was to post a screed on Google.com like the one we had launched previously about pop-up ads, but with a specific focus on identifying and removing scumware programs. I was a hundred percent for it, but this time, others had concerns. First, it would be hard to be righteous when we were doing business with a scumware site. We'd have to terminate that relationship before going any further. Second, several engineers were reluctant to launch an arms race against an invisible enemy while we were a sitting target.

Marissa proposed a compromise. We would be launching a pop-up blocker for the Google toolbar in a month or two. It would stop pop-ups from appearing, but not remove the programs that launched them. Could we fold Matt's language about scumware into the page talking about that new feature? She argued that simply taking a stand against scumware without context might seem self-serving, that people would think we just didn't want to lose revenue from users the programs hijacked to other sites.

I didn't want to compromise. Scumware was not a revenue issue, it was a privacy issue. I had personally experienced the invasive nature of a parasite program, and seen my dad's frustration as it crippled his computer. That infuriated me and perhaps clouded my judgment. I assured Matt I was prepared to wield a flaming sword and pursue those responsible to the ends of the earth. Or at the least, to make a positive assertion that Google was not behind the nasty behavior that irritated affected users. Google was righteous. "Google," I wanted the world to know, "would never screw its users."

Matt said he liked the idea of Google as a consumer advocate, fighting on behalf of users even on issues not directly affecting us. That encouraged me. The more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself that "consumer advocate" should be the next phase of Google's brand evolution. We would leave the sea of search and step onto the dry land of a new, more wondrous world in which we would become not just the source