I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59

by Douglas Edwards

  As the changes rolled out throughout the day, user reaction was all over the map. Some praised us for the useful information. Others complained about the wording that directed people to their TVs. Some sniffed that it wasn't our role to act as a news provider. Some warned us that our uncluttered interface had drawn them to us in the first place and threatened to leave if we didn't clean up the homepage and lose the links.

  I wondered at the parochialism of these people. Didn't they understand that something extraordinary had occurred, requiring extraordinary measures on our part? To be fair, if Sergey hadn't taken a hammer to the image of a polished and perfect brand I had carried with me to Google, I might have been confused as well. We were a corporation, a legal entity providing a product solely to earn a profit—yet here we were, acting like a well-meaning bystander attempting CPR at a car wreck. Should we maintain professional detachment instead of throwing up hurried HTML that made our homepage a mess?

  And then there were those who thought we weren't doing enough. A German user suggested we paint our logo black. Steve Schimmel in our business development group argued that our response lacked a "human side"—that we should put a "message of sorrow" on the homepage. Cindy and I disagreed with both of them. It didn't feel appropriate to jump in so quickly with a condolence message, while news was still pouring out. Would we look insincere? Awkward? Or worse, would we seem to be capitalizing on a national tragedy? I didn't want to make any rash decisions we might later view as ill-conceived. Already I saw disturbing opportunism cropping up around us. One news organization asked to be moved higher on our list while others demanded to know why their competitors appeared and they didn't. The jostling and jockeying for position intensified by the hour.

  I shared with Steve my belief that expressing personal grief through our website logo or a homepage message would trivialize an overwhelming tragedy. The wound was too raw for us to give voice to the pain we all felt. What I didn't tell him was that I felt it would be self-aggrandizing, as if Google were saying, "Look at us. Look how important we are. On this day of despair, we're making a statement on our homepage. Isn't that special?"

  As usual, Sergey was there to help with my dilemma. "I'd like to put a mourning message on the site," he said. "Offering condolences and a link to more information." Okay then. I drafted the wording and sent it to him, along with my reservations about his timing. He brushed off my concerns and directed me to put up a link the next day, pointing to our expression of sorrow and support.

  I went home that evening shaken and depressed. At least I had been able to share in the illusion that I had been doing something useful instead of sitting by and watching impotently.

  "So this is how Google handles a crisis," I thought, as I monitored email late into the night. We had no comprehensive plan in place, but there was neither panic nor chaos. In this unique set of circumstances, people did what they did best and thought about how they could do more. We worked through problems, devised solutions, and calmly discussed contentious issues. Ultimately, our leaders made decisions that ended debate and we moved ahead.

  The next day did not start well. The Washington Post interpreted our message directing users to their TVs to mean Google itself had been unable to handle increased traffic. Users asked why we had not modified our logo to honor those killed, or at least put a flag on our homepage to show solidarity with our countrymen. We changed our logo for less important things. Why not this? I've explained how I felt about a commemorative logo, but I had separate reservations about pasting a flag on the homepage. To me, waving the Stars and Stripes would provide immediate gratification but send the wrong message. I felt physically ill watching my country under attack, but I didn't want Google making a knee-jerk nationalistic gesture just to prove we were loyal Americans. Too many people had claimed moral superiority before 9/11 because they had flags in their hands—even as they acted to promote their own interests.

  My dad flew night missions with the OSS over Germany and occupied France during World War II. He taught me that anyone can wave a flag; that the true measure of patriotism is what you actually do when your country needs you. I took that message to heart. Still, we at Google were Americans and we wanted to show our support—and it quickly became obvious that our users, at least those in this country, expected us to do so. I tried to figure out a way to do it appropriately.

  Meanwhile, Tim Armstrong, the head of our New York sales team,* told us they were planning to reopen Google's midtown office the following day. They had emptied the kitchens and given the food to firefighters and police, but they were anxious to reestablish some sense of routine.

  I gave up on work. My heart wasn't in it. I started plugging search terms into Google to see what I could learn about the who and the why of what had happened. What was the significance of the date September 11? I didn't find much. The Turner Diaries, a neo-Nazi work of fiction dating from 1978, referred to bombings taking place in Houston on September 11. The Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles was signed on September 13. Tenuous connections at best.

  More curious was a September 4 Usenet post archived in Google groups. A writer calling himself "Nostradamus" had written, "Wait 7 days, and then maybe I'll answer this post. You see, I am going away in seven days, and you will not hear from me again." Seven days later was 9/11. Kulpreet, our in-house attorney, informed me that the FBI had already asked about it.

  As soon as the names of the suspected terrorists were released, I ran them all through Google. Only one returned something interesting. A Palestinian relief organization headquartered in the United States showed up when I searched for Mohamed Atta. However, his name was nowhere to be found on the site. I clicked on Google's cached version of the page, a snapshot of the way the site had looked when we crawled it weeks earlier. That older version of the page referred to several cases the organization had been involved with, including that of a seventeen-year-old Mohamed Atta. Atta had been helped with medical treatment at an American hospital after being admitted with a gunshot wound. I checked the current version of the website again, but Atta's story no longer appeared—and as far as I could tell, his bio was the only one that had been removed. I had no idea how common the name Atta was, and I didn't know if this was the same Mohamed Atta who had been identified as a hijacker, but I wanted to help and the deletion seemed suspicious. Unsure what to do with the information, I consulted Sergey. He told me to pass it on to the FBI.

  Sergey, too, had been thinking about how Google might be used to identify the terrorists, but his thinking went deeper than mine. First, he forwarded to Karen and me a Terrorist Activity Information form to post on the site so that users could report tips to the FBI. Then he very quietly asked a small group of us to begin checking our log files.

  "Google is big enough at this point that it's entirely possible the terrorists used it to help plan their attack," he pointed out. "We can try to identify them based on intersecting sets of search queries conducted during the period prior to the hijackings." It made sense. While after 9/11 there were many queries about the World Trade Center and the explosive potential of a fully fueled jetliner, it seemed likely there had not been a great number before that date.

  A quick note of explanation about what data was in our logs. We did not have personal information about users (names and addresses), but like most websites, Google placed a unique string of numbers on each user's computer when it connected to our site. This string of numbers is known as a cookie. In our logs, all searches were associated with the cookie and the IP address of the computer conducting the search. So if we saw one cookie connected to several searches relating to the bombing, we might be able to identify the user's Internet address. And by looking at other searches he had conducted, we might be able to determine his real-world identity. For example, if the user had searched on his own name (a relatively common occurrence), that search would be connected by his cookie to the other searches he had done.

  Sergey compiled a list of words to lo
ok for in the logs, including "Boeing," "aviation school," "Logan airport," and "fuel capacity." In a first run, the logs team found about a hundred thousand queries a day that matched some of his criteria. I added a set of terms I derived from searches across message boards where the names of the hijackers had appeared before 9/11, though I realized it was likely those messages were coincidental posts by unfortunate users sharing the hijackers' names.

  As far as I know, no one outside Google had requested that we mine the logs, though news reports indicated that the government had installed Carnivore machines (computers that can monitor Internet communications) at a few ISPs to track conversations across the web in real time. Reports also said the government was searching ISP logs for traffic from a specific email address. The Bush administration's interest in Internet chatter had expanded exponentially overnight.

  I had no qualms about helping with Sergey's search effort. No one knew if there were other terrorist cells waiting to attack and if so, where they would strike. If we could provide information that might save lives, we had a moral obligation to do so. The cost in terms of potential loss of privacy seemed negligible, given how constrained our parameters were. We would only try to identify individuals who had displayed, before 9/11, a suspicious interest in topics clearly related to the hijackings.

  Still, there was no way to avoid the fact that we were trying to sift out specific users on the basis of their searches. If we found them, we would try to determine their personal information from the data about them in our logs. I think about that when I hear debates over Internet privacy. The "Yada Yada" wording I wrote for the Toolbar had been my first encounter with potential issues of user privacy. This was the second. The debate over user data was not one we had actively engaged internally or with our users, and I worried that it would escalate into a potentially devastating communications issue for us. I resolved to find a way to defuse it—once life returned to some semblance of normality.

  The search of our logs for the 9/11 terrorists turned up nothing of interest. The closest we came was a cookie that had searched for both "world trade center" and "Egypt air hijack." If the terrorists had used Google to plan their attack, they had done so in a way that we couldn't discover.

  I turned my attention to our burgeoning News and Resources page, which had grown kudzu-like into a long list of links to news sources and relief organizations. It had been visited more than four hundred thousand times the day after the attacks. My charge was to keep it current, which quickly became a politically sensitive role. One of our VCs asked us to add a donation site run by a company he backed. One of our salespeople had a client that covered technology. News organizations from around the world beseeched us to be added. I had no set criteria by which to determine who was link-worthy and who was not, so I winged it, checking with Cindy on submissions that I felt could go either way or might have PR ramifications. Users requested news sources in the Middle East and Africa. And Canada. I had neglected our neighbors to the north and they felt under-appreciated. I added the CBC and English-language news services from Arab and African sources. I reminded everyone that the page was a temporary service and "not intended to become a permanent feature of our site." They didn't seem to care.

  All week, we walked a fine line through a new set of circumstances, unsure of what our next step should be. It was an instance where we couldn't run user testing or rely on data we had in-house. We had to go with our instincts. Eric forbade unnecessary travel, and we cancelled the launch of a group of international Google sites because Afghanistan was one of the included domains. Eric also cautioned us to be particularly sensitive when interacting with angry users, given the tenor of the times. We did not take his warning lightly. One user, irate about the results returned when he searched for his own name, threatened to show up at our office and "do a Rainbow 6 on Google's front door."* I put our local police in touch with him. Another user, upset about our caching of his copyrighted photos, berated us on the phone with an irrational, profanity-laden tirade. The photos in question were grainy amateur shots of his cat that he had posted online. And so it went. In the days after 9/11, we couldn't write off any threat as coming from just another crackpot.

  Meanwhile, I continued to struggle with the tone of our communication to users. On the Monday after 9/11, a Boston University graduate named Alon Cohen emailed us a small image and asked if we would put it on our homepage. It was a red, white, and blue looped ribbon, and it was exactly what I wanted. It wasn't generic, gaudy, or cartoonish, and it didn't shout, "Look at us! We're patriots!" It was simple and tasteful and conveyed respect. I sent it to Karen and asked her opinion. She liked it, so I took it to Larry and Sergey. We posted the ribbon that day—on the homepage—with a link to the condolence message we had put up the week before. Almost immediately an offended user complained because we hadn't used "a real American flag," claiming our ribbon had a "politically correct stench." He was harsher than most, but hardly alone in demanding we display more overt patriotism.

  An ad rep in our New York office asked to create Google t-shirts with a stars-and-stripes version of our logo. He wanted to give them to all our clients. His colleagues loved the idea, but it put me once again in the position of saying, "Whoa, Horsey."

  "We've been careful with the site itself not to cross the boundary between showing support and calling attention to the fact that we're doing that as a company called Google," I explained in a note to him. "I think this might cross that line by literally wrapping us in the flag." The thought crossed my mind that brand management was all about knowing what you needed to "no." The bigger we grew, the greater the forces buffeting our brand and the more powerful the currents causing us to drift from the anchor of our strategy. Without constant care, the trust we had built with the public would crash against the rocks. I based my decisions on experience, intuition, customer contacts, staff discussions, founder feedback, and my own developing sense of what was "Googley." But I was basically guessing.

  On 9/11, the whole world shifted. Old rules no longer applied. Except at Google, where the post-attack anarchy more clearly exposed our normal modus operandi: Larry and Sergey did what they thought was right and the Google brand tagged along for the ride. I ran after our lead-off hitters, always a step slow and a base behind. As soon as I adopted a position I thought they had declared inviolate ("Google only does search"), Larry and Sergey raced on ("Now we do news, too"). I tried pointing us back toward familiar turf by proposing a timeline for phasing out the news page.

  "We should return to our normal homepage on Monday, September 24," I recommended. "The longer we wait, the more awkward it will be to remove the ribbon and the link, because when we do, people will say it means we no longer care." The natural flow of news would ebb after the second week, I thought. That was the nature of disasters and the public's attention span. Users would understand our return to business as usual. Besides, we were now crawling news sites on a more frequent basis and including that information in Google searches. We could point people to that service instead.

  Larry rejected my plan. Our news search didn't work well enough to use it as a substitute, he said. Sergey believed the United States would attack Afghanistan within a week, and the news page would once again be valuable. Reporters let Cindy know that they loved it, too. And so it stayed, and I went back to tending my little garden of links.

  By October 3, it seemed reasonable to start running promotional messages on our homepage again. Promotion lines brought in advertisers and drove use of our services, but we had stopped displaying them on 9/11. If we put the ribbon and the memorial link next to the promotion line, they would look like ads. I recommended that we move them to the bottom of the page, where they would feel slightly asymmetrical and thus temporary, making it easier to remove them in the future. Larry thought it would just make the jobs and corporate info links already at the bottom of the page look 9/11-related too. I was about to respond to his concerns when we started bombing Afghanistan.


  Forget the ribbon and the promotion line, Larry commanded. Put up a news headline instead.

  "Not so fast," Urs responded. "Are we now a news site? Are we competing with CNN? Why do we have a news headlines on our front page? I can see the point for a one-time event like 9/11, but I don't see the point of doing it now. Can someone explain the rationale?"

  The company split on the question. Karen felt it pushed us dangerously close to becoming a portal. Marissa thought we should hold off until we could do news "right" by implementing the automated news service that engineer Krishna Bharat was building. Cindy was still getting smiley-faced comments about the page from her press contacts and wanted to keep it. I argued that portals like Yahoo had dedicated teams that managed news better than Karen and I could do on our own. Our page, to use one of Cindy's favorite phrases that always made me wince, "was Mickey Mouse."

  Salar sided with us dissenters. "Do we intend to update the latest news about the war as it goes on?" he asked. "Aren't we setting user expectations and doing a poor job of meeting them?" Salar sounded persuasive, especially when Omid joined our chorus of naysayers. It was a typical Google decision-making episode—input from everywhere thrown into the hopper to be processed by the founders. I tossed in one last point I thought would cinch the deal: only a small percentage of people who saw the news link clicked on it. The use of the valuable homepage space was clearly inefficient.

  None of it mattered in the end, because one of the people clicking on the homepage link was Sergey. "As a user, I just want to see what is going on in the world using a few top sites," he told us. "I don't see any rush to get rid of this with U.S. attacks and potential terrorist retaliation."