I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [55]
"Turn it off. It thinks I'm German." The off-key refrain caught my ear.
"I found MentalPlex mildly amusing, but the different languages on the results page make it harder to use. The joke gets old very quickly."
Discordant voices sang about confusion and annoyance. They swelled from a hoarse whisper to a shrill harangue to a roaring cacophony of insistent outrage that could not be ignored. By ten p.m., it was painfully clear that for many in Google's global audience, jokes about Germany and mind control were just not funny. I emailed Susan, who was still at the office monitoring feedback, and suggested we get rid of the German message. She had already identified the problem and called Sergey. He okayed removing the German error message and the linked results page. Okay. A minor hitch resolved.
Except, it was Friday night. All the engineering staff were with Sergey, washing away the week's woes at Zibbibos, a trendy restaurant twenty minutes away in downtown Palo Alto. No one in the office was authorized to make the change. I sat at home watching more and more messages complaining about Germans, German thoughts, and German jokes drop into my mailbox and explode. Little ice balls formed on the back of my neck, then rolled down my spine.
A half hour passed. Then another. We were taking a pounding on email. Finally, the offensive German ground to a halt. Thanks to some anonymous engineer, no more unwanted German results confused our users. Now our unwanted results were in Portuguese. The engineers thought the joke was just too funny to eliminate entirely, so they simply shifted the interface to another language. Users didn't like German? Fine, we'll give them something else.
"No! No! No!" I told them. The problem wasn't the language; it was how hard the foreign interface made it to use our results. We were breaking our brand, and instead of repairing the cracks they found it more amusing to watch our equity pour onto the floor. I had lived through PR crises before, and this one was becoming a sabakova kashmar.*
Complaints kept coming. Though the tone was less virulent than when the German text was up, users were still unhappy they couldn't navigate the site easily. We were breaking a cardinal rule by making it difficult for them to get to information they sought. One user lamented that our little joke was costing her money—a professional researcher, she could no longer use Google to do her job.
I had worked at big companies long enough that I hesitated to escalate the problem to our top executive. But I had worked at Google long enough not to be intimidated by an org chart. I called Sergey. It was hard to hear over the background noise of rowdy engineers in a crowded restaurant, but I could tell he was surprised when I insisted we drop all the foreign-language results.
I was pooping the party, but Sergey reluctantly agreed, most likely so he could rejoin the festivities without fear of another interruption.
It took forever to reach Susan, and it was midnight before all the foreign-language text was stripped off the site.
"A not-insignificant fraction of our users are complete idiots," groused one engineer, "if they can't figure out how to use our site, just because it's all in Portuguese." Google had clearly crossed the gap from serving the tech elite to playing in the mainstream market—an online segment he knew to be densely populated with the clueless.
"I'm more worried that we got spooked by a little negative feedback," said Howard, the iconoclastic easy-riding engineer. "We backed off the playfulness that's an important part