I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [81]
Yes.
Yes.
Yes, I would.
The Sweet Taste of Porn
Larry and Sergey randomly fixated on details that caught their attention, such as the exact shade of yellow paint to be applied to the Google Search Appliance (our "search engine in a box" for corporate intranets) or the wording of their biographies on the website, but mostly they set up a management infrastructure, wrote a few rules, and let the system run. Each new layer of process would require compiling time and slow things down, so they promulgated a laissez-faire style that largely left employees to their own devices.
Total autonomy was a satisfactory state for most engineers. "Larry and Sergey went to meetings every week, sat in back, and listened to people talking about things," Matt Cutts later recalled. "They'd give us room to decide whatever we thought was the most important thing to work on." Which isn't to say that the founders didn't express their own strongly held beliefs. "If something didn't match their intuitions," Matt added, "they fought until they had good data or a good reason to believe or had seen a particular person be right a few times. Then they'd be willing to trust that person's judgment."
Matt earned his own chunk of autonomy by taking on one of the company's dirtiest jobs. He'd been at Google a month or two when project manager Deb Kelly stopped by his cubicle with a question.
"Hey, Matt. How do you feel about porn?"
"That depends," Matt replied. "Why are you asking?"
Deb needed someone to work on a filter to screen out "adult" content, which by definition meant being exposed to the seamiest parts of the web. Matt agreed to tackle the job, thinking it would take only a couple of weeks. Instead, it was three months before he had a prototype ready to test. To give it a thorough vetting would require conducting more searches than Matt had time to do himself, so in May 2000 he sent out a call to his fellow Googlers for help.
No one responded.
"It's weird," Matt said to his wife that evening. "You'd think people would take advantage of an officially sanctioned opportunity to look for porn."
His wife thought it might just be a matter of the proper motivation. "Why don't I make cookies," she suggested, "and people will get a little reward."
The next day Matt reiterated his need for help but augmented it with an offer of free "porn cookies" for everyone who participated. Search for porn, get a cookie. I was one of those who couldn't resist such a come-on. Over the next few hours I learned several new words and new meanings for some I thought I already knew.
Porn is a cutthroat business that often leads in the exploitation of new technology. Working on what would be dubbed SafeSearch, Matt became aware of a new problem for Google. Spam. Spammers attempted to game the system and thereby win a higher ranking in search results than they deserved. Matt came to think of spammers as "black hats" who placed invisible white text on a white background, stuffed their pages full of keywords, and employed a wide range of sophisticated and devious means to deceive Google's search bot.
"Once you start to see spam, the curse is, you'll see it everywhere," Matt told me. He was offended by spammers' unethical behavior and continued thinking about the problem even after he finished his filter and began working on Google's advertising system. Larry and Sergey thought spam was a non-issue, because they were confident Google's PageRank algorithm would sort the wheat from the chaff.
"It took quite a while for Google to wake up to fact that while PageRank was very spam resistant, it wasn't a hundred percent perfect," Matt noted. He took the initiative to sound the alarm. Although it was no longer his area of responsibility and not an area of concern to management, he asked to work on fighting spam. "One thing I learned at Google," he said to me, "is that you make your own cred. If you propose your own initiative, you're much more