• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1923 0

of putting a Band-Aid on global ignorance and confusion, they would clear the clogged arteries of the world's data systems and move information effortlessly to the point at which it was needed at exactly the time it was required. They would be, Larry believed, an information conglomerate on the scale of General Electric—the GE of IT. To do that, they would need better tools—starting with a search engine that actually delivered what people wanted to find.

Engineers rebel at inefficiency. Larry Page, more than anyone I ever met, hated systems that ate hours and produced suboptimal results. His burning passion was to help the world stop wasting his time.

That love of efficiency begat a fondness for frugality, because paying more than the bare minimum for something was by definition wasteful. Larry liked trimming unnecessary expenses, but it was Sergey who fully applied his razor-sharp intellect to cutting costs.

"That seems kind of expensive," Sergey said, looking at the hundred-dollar price for a cab from Malpensa airport to downtown Milan in January 2003. He, his girlfriend, and I had flown in for the opening of our new Italian office, and I was looking forward to traveling in style with the president of a booming Internet company. The dot-com era was over for everyone else, but Google's financials were deep in the black. Even though we'd flown coach, surely now we'd be kicking loose a little change to let the Old World know we had indeed arrived.

"Maybe we should take the bus," Sergey suggested, standing in the middle of the baggage claim area squinting at the signage. "It's less than five Euros a person." The bus? What? Were we college kids backpacking on spring break? Maybe we could just hitchhike into town. It was pouring out, and a cab would take us right to our door, not to some run-down depot a short walk from nowhere.

We compromised on the train, which ended up saving us fifty dollars, not counting the cost to my inflated sense of importance.

Efficiency. Frugality. And oh yes, integrity.

Larry and Sergey had an intuitive feel for presenting data in a way that improved the ratio of signal to noise. That means they didn't believe in adding unnecessary crap to the information you actually wanted to see. So, no blinking banner ads in Google search results. No links to every service Google offered pasted all over the Google.com homepage. And no intermingling of ads with actual search results as our competitor GoTo.com was doing. To corrupt a working system would be to profane perfection.

"We could try a loyalty program," I once suggested in a meeting about getting users to search more often, "like a frequent flyer program."

Larry raised his eyebrows the way he does when he considers an idea so blatantly ridiculous you should be ashamed of yourself for even thinking it.

"Frequent flyer programs are evil," he said.

"They are?" I didn't recall my Mileage Plus number ending in 666.

"They incentivize people to take flights that are not the most direct or the cheapest, just so they can earn points. Their employers end up paying more, and people lose time traveling."

Loyalty programs promoted loyalty above efficiency, and that was just wrong, wrong, wrong.

Efficiency, Frugality, Integrity. I suppose if you had stitched that onto a flag, most Googlers would have saluted. There were other operating principles I unearthed picking my way along through trial and error, but those three constitute the mother lode from which they were mined.

And while we're in the mines, let's explore exactly what my fifty-plus honest Google colleagues were toiling to accomplish so cheaply and efficiently.

You Don't Say

I was Google employee number fifty-nine, as near as I can tell, but I started the same week as other people, so my number might have been higher or lower. It doesn't matter. We each contributed according to our ability to improve information access for the betterment of all mankind. That the lowliest engineer's capacity exceeded mine by a bazillion percent made no difference in our status-blind environment.

Theoretically.