I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [54]
Ouch. That hurt. Funny stuff on the homepage felt awfully like online branding to me. I went back to the drawing board.
"Let's see. The message should be positive. Improbable, but not obviously impossible. Hmm. What if Google were so good it delivered results before you even searched?"
Thirty seconds later, I was typing a description of "Ante-Temporal search," a breakthrough development that anticipated user requests. The tone was heavily geekish, but Susan liked it. Sergey thought it was overdone (akin to the pope saying you're overly religious), but encouragingly, he said it had potential. "Maybe you could make it more like this site I saw about kitty porn?" he asked.
Sergey asked Susan to include engineer and bodily-function satirist Ray Sidney in our discussions to make sure the joke ended up with plenty of funny and sufficient tech cred. I dragged Ray and Paul Bucheit into a conference room to brainfart jokes. In that redolent atmosphere, Ray pinned the name "MentalPlex" on our new mind-reading technology. That settled, I hashed out the text for a link on the homepage, a dozen error messages that would be displayed randomly if someone entered a query in the MentalPlex search box, and an FAQ explaining how to visualize a search so MentalPlex could detect it.
Q: I am unable to visualize clicking and have to use my finger to activate the mouse.
A: Click visualization takes practice. Try pushing the mouse button with your eyebrow, then gradually increase the distance between your eye and the mouse.
Marissa pointed out that with our newly launched foreign-language interfaces, we could extend the joke beyond English. "One of the error messages should say that MentalPlex has detected foreign thoughts," she suggested, "and then we can translate the interface text on the results page into German."
In what would become an April Fools' tradition, our webmaster Karen White worked at warp speed right up to the deadline to get the final images and copy in place. We wanted maximum exposure in all time zones, so we would send MentalPlex out at eight p.m. on March 31 and keep it on the site throughout the following day.
Karen pushed the last of the files at 7:55 on Friday night. Soon Google users would see a spinning cartoon spiral on our homepage inviting them to try MentalPlex. I was relieved we'd made the deadline. I was also terrified.
Humor is subjective. Done poorly, it just comes across as pathetic. I didn't want my first attempt at instilling personality into our brand to be branded lame by the digerati, but I also didn't want it to be so much of an in-joke that only geeks would get it. It would be bad enough to tell a joke to millions of people and have no one laugh, but if MentalPlex bombed, I was sure Sergey would just hand all future fun stuff to engineers, condemning me to write product spec sheets and error messages for all eternity.
As soon as Karen hit Submit on the push, I started compulsively refreshing my inbox to check for feedback from users. I had a sense that my entire career was resting on whether or not I had nailed the punch line for this one stupid joke, which felt weaker and more juvenile by the minute.
At 8:01 the first email arrived. "Google is great!" was the header. The user liked the way we played with our homepage. More emails started trickling in. People were surprised. They didn't think search engines had a sense of humor. They liked it. They were ☺. LOL. ROFL. ROFLMAO. They really, really liked it. I let the glow of their adoration wash over me from the screen of my laptop. There were a few confused souls who didn't get it at