I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [2]
To start, I'll give you the background I wish someone had given me on my first day at Google, so you can appreciate the chaos without getting lost in it yourself.
Let's begin with a quick sketch of the company's founding. Google started as a joint research project by Larry and Sergey in 1996, when they were graduate students at Stanford. They based their project on a new approach to search technology that Larry named PageRank in honor of himself and because, well, it ranked web pages according to their importance.* Their algorithm took into account all the hyperlinks pointing to a given web page from other websites, as if by linking to a page those other sites were declaring it worthy of attention. Most search engines just looked at the content of the pages themselves and based their results on how often the searched-for word appeared on them. It was the difference between judging a stranger by his looks and gathering opinions from everyone who knew him. Because Larry and Sergey's technology analyzed what was going on behind the scenes, they called their search engine "BackRub." For a while, a photo of Larry's hand caressing a bare shoulder was their logo, but even after they airbrushed out the dark hairs, it looked like a shot from a low- budget porn flick.
In 1997, they changed the name to Google, which played to their love of math and scale (a googol is 10100). They chose the variant spelling for two reasons: the googol.com web domain was taken, and Larry thought they wouldn't be able to trademark a number. Larry was a very shrewd businessman—but we'll get to that.
Within a year, Larry and Sergey had taken leave from Stanford and set up in the Menlo Park garage of Susan Wojcicki, the college roommate of Sergey's girlfriend. Google's traffic began climbing and the company began hiring. They incorporated in September 1998, and when they outgrew Susan's garage in early 1999, they moved to an office at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto. Six months later, having talked two venture capital firms out of $25 million, they moved into an industrial park at 2400 Bayshore Parkway in Mountain View. That's where I joined the company, which at the time had about fifty employees and was doing almost seven million searches a day. Even though that was a seventy thousand percent increase over the year before, it barely registered as a blip on the radar of major players like Yahoo, AOL, and MSN, which were each delivering on the order of half a billion page views per day.
Yahoo was the Jabba the Hutt of the "search space" at the turn of the millennium, and it wasn't even a search engine. Yahoo was a "portal," a provider of mail and news and all kinds of services built around a hand-compiled directory of web pages arranged by categories. It had almost thirty million users, but it rented technology to power its search box from Inktomi, the leading provider of search to websites and corporate intranets.
Industry experts speculated, Would Google focus on growing its own site to compete with Yahoo, or would it become a technology supplier and compete with Inktomi? If we tried to do both—build a popular online search engine while providing search technology to other sites that hoped to do the same thing—we would end up competing with our customers. The question, however, betrayed ignorance of Larry and Sergey's aspirations and self-confidence. Why choose just to have cake when you could eat it too? Google would be both a supplier and a search site, because Larry and Sergey knew they were smart enough to isolate the part of the equation containing failure and work around it.
Their vision didn't end at winning the search wars. They would build a company to fix large-scale problems affecting millions of people and terraform the entire landscape of human knowledge. They would speed medical breakthroughs, accelerate the exploration of space, break down language barriers. Instead