I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [37]
A Real Ethical Dilemma
Having banned banners, we looked for other sources of revenue to supplement our plain text ads. A company called RealNames fit into that plan, but not comfortably.
Foremost among the moneymaking strategies our competitors employed in early 2000 was pay-for-placement, the practice of allowing advertisers to pay a fee to receive a more prominent position in organic search results.* GoTo's model was entirely pay-for-placement since it blatantly sold the top position to the highest bidder. Other sites simply included listings in the body of their search results without identifying that money had changed hands to put them there.
Pay-for-placement made Larry angry. It was unethical to confuse users about what was objectively useful and what showed up because someone paid to jump to the front of the line. Besides, it ruined a good algorithm. If you were generating useful results, why intentionally corrupt them with less valuable data? In the paper they had written together as grad students at Stanford, Larry and Sergey had identified pay-for-placement as "more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who 'deserves' to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed."†
The problem with religious principles is that believers employ different standards of orthodoxy. For us, RealNames was the shibboleth that separated purists from pragmatists. RealNames sold keywords to companies and then worked with search engines to make sure that links to their clients' homepages showed up at the top of search results. For example, Ford might buy the keyword "Ford Explorer" to ensure that searchers for that term would see a link to Ford's own Explorer page. If we didn't already display that page as our first result, RealNames would pay us to include the link above and separate from our results. MSN, AltaVista, and Go.com were doing it, but we struggled with how to display RealNames links while making it clear they were neither Google-generated results nor paid advertisements.
"I feel as though we've sold out with this RealNames thing," engineer Paul Bucheit complained to a large group of Googlers including Larry and Sergey. "RealNames is a real source of junk and I think it is only going to get worse." Paul cared deeply about engineering quality and about ethics and especially about the intersection of the two. He summed up his attitude some time later with the phrase "Don't be evil." It caught on.
"This is even worse than auctioning off results," Paul complained. "Just for fun, I registered the RealNames keyword 'Craig Barrett.' Now when you search for 'Craig Barrett' on Google, the top result links to my hideous little web page." I tried it and found myself staring at a glittering pink screen full of animated unicorns and rainbows. At the time, Craig Barrett was the CEO of Intel.
It had never even occurred to me that search engines had integrity to protect. An Internet search engine was just a business, after all, not a public watchdog. Yet the RealNames debate took me right back to 1998 and the boardroom of the Mercury News. I had developed guidelines for accepting advertising on Siliconvalley.com, and the publisher grilled me on every worst-case scenario. "Will Microsoft be able to buy ads next to coverage of their antitrust trial?" he asked. "people will think we've compromised our editorial objectivity." It took weeks to iron out all the permutations to his satisfaction.
In Google's initial implementation in early 2000, we displayed only a small "RN" next to each RealNames result. That didn't test well. Or rather, it tested too well. In usability groups, Stanford students thought that the RealNames link was an extra-special search result that we gave prominence because of its superiority to the rest of the dreck we'd found.
Omid Kordestani