I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [193]
Even MOMA, our free-for-all company intranet, began to show signs of becoming buttoned down. Our engineers had always obsessively collected every scrap of intelligence they could about what was happening within our servers. They analyzed it, kneaded it, and baked it into tasty little tidbits set out on MOMA where any Googler could consume them. The data was anonymized—you couldn't see individual queries or IP addresses, for example-but the number of searches, countries from which they originated, most popular search terms, and other key stats could all be viewed.
MOMA's homepage was originally dense and messy and full of numbers. At the center sat a large graph with colored lines labeled with the names of Muppet characters. The graph represented results quality across different search engines, and the top line, labeled "the Great Gonzo," belonged to Google. When another line veered close to ours, clarion calls could be heard above the gnashing of teeth, ordering that all energies be focused on improving the relevance of our results. Larry and Sergey never forgot that the quality of our search drove our success and never took for granted that our lead was insurmountable. Ironically, the lack of a good way to search MOMA made it hard to use at first, though Google finally hooked up one of its own search appliances to fix that problem.
The most useful aspect of MOMA for me was the phone list, which contained the title, email address, and photo of everyone on the payroll. My picture was there. Sort of. My original photo captured more reflected flash than facial features, so I swapped it out for a press photo of Deputy Director Skinner from The X-Files. The resemblance was eerie, and his picture conveyed the gravitas and focus my own photo lacked. Other MOMA photos showed samurai warriors and masked figures with titles like "Shadow Ops" and "Black Ops." Yoshka, Urs's Leonberger, was listed as "Google's top dog." New Googlers looking me up for the first time would inevitably email me, asking about my uncanny resemblance to Mulder's boss. I'd assure them that the truth was out there.
In fact, the truth was on MOMA. I came to assume that any information I needed about Google could be found on the intranet, from the status of products in development to the number of employees at any point in the company's history. It was a shared wellspring of data that all Googlers could tap to test hypotheses, build prototypes, and win arguments.
In mid-2003, Susan put some product plans and strategic documents on MOMA that required a password to access. She was concerned that the sales team might accidentally spill too much to clients. As head of product management, Jonathan told her to make the documents accessible because Google so strongly valued the free flow of information among staff members. Only performance appraisals and compensation were off limits. "This is extremely unusual for a company to do," Eric Schmidt often reminded us at our weekly TGIF meetings, "but we will continue trusting everyone with sensitive information unless it becomes a problem."
In September 2003, it became a problem. Information about our revenue numbers and Larry and Sergey's stock holdings started showing up in news reports. Eric immediately clamped down, telling Omid and me to stop including revenue numbers in TGIF presentations. Passwords on MOMA were no longer forbidden. It was a shame, Eric observed, that reality had finally come to Google.
The source for the stories turned out to be a low-level administrator feeding