I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [82]
Within days, Matt connected with the group of eight engineers focused on overall search quality, including Jeff, Sanjay, and Amit Singhal. They invited him to join them around the Ping-Pong table and delve into the deepest aspects of Google's core technology. Matt became privy to Google's secret sauce, the weighting factors that determined whether a website was near the top of the first results page or buried somewhere on page thirty.
Matt always struck me as a pillar of moral rectitude, a keeper of the faith in algorithmic integrity, and an adamant protector of Google's purity—our own avuncular Elliot Ness, bringing to account those who parasitically thrived by bootlegging traffic. As a University of Kentucky student, Matt had enrolled in a co-op program through the Department of Defense and ended up spending a few semesters at the National Security Agency. That internship was great fodder for the conspiracy theorists monitoring Google. Matt's "secret" government tie made their tin hats stand at full attention, because they assumed Matt still served as a conduit between big government and big search.* In truth, Matt was one of the least "spooky" guys I knew at Google.
Because he understood the innermost details of Google's ranking calculations, Matt was outraged when a webmaster bulletin board speculated in 2001 that Google was manipulating results to increase sales of our advertising. If a business didn't show up near the top of our results, they alleged, it would have to buy ads to have a presence on the first page users saw after a search. The rumor wasn't surprising, given the practices of most search engines at the time. The Federal Trade Commission had called out eight of Google's competitors for blurring the lines between paid placement, advertising, and algorithmically produced results. Matt again took the initiative to address a problem others didn't immediately see. He went to PR manager David Krane.
"So ... while I'm compiling," he asked Krane, "would it be okay if I stopped by this forum and debunked misconceptions?" Krane reported to Cindy, and Cindy had read the Cluetrain Manifesto—a guide advocating that companies speak directly and plainly to the public instead of engaging in Velveeta-smooth, committee-processed, content-lite corporate blandishments. Cindy had made sure everyone else in marketing read it as well. Krane gave Matt carte blanche to speak freely on the company's behalf, without running his posts by PR.
"GoogleGuy" was born.
Matt's nom de plume became an authoritative voice in the webmaster community and a trusted source of information from inside Google. GoogleGuy corrected misinformation, killed rumors, and explained why Google did things that seemed off kilter to outsiders.
Initiative crossed with autonomy provided unforeseen benefits in unexpected areas. Unexpected challenges as well. Other engineers also sought to speak in unvarnished language on Google's behalf without formal endorsement by Cindy's minions—or even our awareness.
Ray Sidney comes to mind.
The Ray Way
Ray, Google employee number six, embodied the cult of individual authority. His "dude"-infused speech and ribald and unpredictable passions obscured an education earned at Caltech, Harvard, and MIT. Ray was our first line of defense against webmasters who pummeled Google with automated queries. Webmasters and SEOs* wanted to make sure their sites showed up near the top of Google results and so used monitoring software to conduct repeated automatic searches for keywords important to them. In periods of high volume, automated queries slowed down Google for everyone, which is why we considered them a violation of our terms of service.†
Ray took unauthorized automated queries very personally. If he could figure out the spammer's email address, he sent a terse cease-and-desist warning. If he couldn't find an email address, he blocked the spammer's IP (internet protocol) address—the unique number assigned to