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Here Comes You-Know-Who

During the spring of 2000, I didn't sense any great strain in the fabric of the company as I grew accustomed to its rhythms. The basic elements had coalesced: a physical plant, a core engineering team, finance and HR staff, and even marketing in support of a product for which the demand seemed insatiable. The coming months would be about holding on. A previously unmet need was rushing headlong toward the provider of a free solution—bucking our audience numbers higher and higher with each lunge forward. On May 8, 2000, Google's traffic topped eight million searches a day. Two weeks later, it was nine million. In theory, we could grow forever, but each bounding leap threatened to bring our ride to an abrupt and messy end because we couldn't add capacity fast enough.

The biggest jump lay just weeks ahead. No one spoke about it, but as I stood in line at the café, debating what I could actually eat from Charlie's Appalachian Day menu (pickled pigs feet, okra consommé, free-range pork rinds, moon pies with mayonnaise, and Twinkie cheez-dogs), it seemed there were more than the usual number of empty seats. The few engineers I did glimpse hurriedly filled their trays and headed back to their desks wearing stress and fatigue like battle-tattered hockey jerseys.

Rumors and whispers about a big hairy deal had been spreading over the cables and through the cubicles, but no one would confirm whose business we were attempting to capture.

Urs knew. He rode herd on his ops team to build capacity in the data-center cages as fast as humanly possible. We would need every server we could cobble together to feed the ravenous behemoth we hoped to contain there.

We were going after Yahoo.

Inktomi's contract to supply search results to Yahoo was up for renewal in June 2000, and Yahoo did not intend to extend the partnership, a fact they were hiding from the world at large. They wanted Google to provide the fall-through search on their site, just as we did for Netscape. If users couldn't find what they wanted in Yahoo's directory, they would use Google to search the web.

Why the shift? Inktomi saw portal search as an unprofitable sideline—they focused on providing search services for the internal networks of large enterprises—so they didn't feel the need to push themselves on Yahoo's behalf. That opened the door for Google. Larry and Sergey dug deep to offer favorable financial terms,* and it didn't hurt that the Stanford guys running Yahoo and the Stanford guys running Google had common ground, or that Omid Kordestani knew Udi Manber—the top search guy at Yahoo—or that Google and Yahoo shared a board member in Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital, a communication channel that smoothed the progress of the deal.

Google also promised dramatic improvements in search quality. Google's technology had surpassed Inktomi's and would continue to do so, because Google did care, truly and deeply, about consumer search. Google, however, wasn't the only contender pushing for a seat at the table to eat Inktomi's lunch.

"FAST† was a scare for a while in early 2000," Urs admitted. "They came out with a large index and they were pretty fast. They were not bad quality-wise, but they had real trouble keeping their index fresh. Maybe they were trying to do too many things. By 2001 we felt we were clearly better than Inktomi results-wise, clearly better than AltaVista, clearly better than FAST. We had the best search engine."

And what about Google's comparative quality the year before, when Netscape had become a partner? "Netscape was kind of crazy to switch their search to us," Urs confessed. He believed they made the change "in part because they didn't care about search that much ... It was a cost center."

Not to mention that Omid Kordestani happened to be an excellent salesperson. "Omid could type in 'IBM' on Google and type in 'IBM' on AltaVista," Urs recalls, "and say 'Hey look, aren't our results better?' That was the level of sophistication. Our search