In The Plex

by Steve Levy

  186 In 2007, Google conducted Jake Brutlag, “Speed Matters for Google Search,” Google, internal publication, June 22, 2009; Jake Brutlag, Hilary Hutchinson, and Maria Stone, “User Preference and Search Engine Latency,” JSM Proceedings, Quality and Productivity Research Section, 2008. The Bing results were revealed in Eric Schurman and Jake Brutlag, “The User and Business Impact of Server Delays, Additional Bytes and HTTP Chunking in Web Search,” joint presentation at the 2009 Velocity Conference, San Jose, Calif., June 23, 2009.

  188 In 2001, Exodus suffered Wayne Epperson, “Ten Turning Points: The Rise and Fall of Exodus,” Web Host Industry Review, September 2004.

  192 The town was The Dalles The town’s history is chronicled on www.historicthedalles.org.

  193 On February 16, 2005 Kathy Gray, “Port Deal with Google to Create Jobs,” The Dalles Chronicle, February 16, 2005.

  193 New York Times reporter John Markoff, “Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks More Power,” The New York Times, June 14, 2006.

  194 Voldemort Rodger Nichols, “Inside the World of Google The Dalles,” The Dalles Chronicle, August 5, 2007.

  194 “When you have” Brown, “A Conversation with Wayne Rosing.”

  195 Moncks Corner Jim Tatum, “It’s a Googley Life,” The Berkeley Independent (Berkeley County, N.C.), May 5, 2009.

  196 A study funded Jonathan Koomey, Estimating Total Power Consumption by Servers in the U.S. and the World (Oakland, Calif.: Analytics Press, February 15, 2007).

  197 eliminated chillers Rich Miller, “Google’s Chiller-less Data Center,” Data Center Knowledge, July 15, 2009.

  198 Indeed, a 2009 publication Luiz Andrés Barroso and Urs Hölzle, The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Style Machines (Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture, Morgan and Claypool, 2009).

  199 MapReduce Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, “MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters,” Procedures of the 6th OSDI, December 2004. A good account of MapReduce and Hadoop is in Steven Baker, “Google and the Wisdom of Clouds,” BusinessWeek, December 24, 2007.

  204 build its own browser I wrote about Chrome, the Google browser, in “Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web,” Wired, October 2008.

  206 Google had gotten From a New York Times article (Laura Holson, “Putting a Bolder Face on Google,” March 1, 2009) that reported that Marissa Mayer had directed her team to test forty-one gradations of blue for an interface element. Mayer later claimed the incident had been misrepresented. But it was cited in a blog post by a Google designer, Douglas Bowman, as part of his explanation for why he left the company. Bowman’s posting was “Goodbye, Google,” www.stopdesign.com, March 20, 2009.

  207 “I remember one Friday” The engineer quoted is Brett Wilson of the Chrome browser team.

  Part Five: Outside the Box

  214 Rubin, who was John Markoff, “I Robot: The Man Behind the Google Phone,” The New York Times, November 4, 2007.

  214 He had funding prospects There is good background on Android development in Dan Roth, “Google’s Open Source Android OS Will Free the Wireless Web,” Wired, July 2008.

  216 The biggest adjustment Markoff, “I Robot.”

  218 Jobs bonded especially In addition to sources at Google and Apple, I drew background on the relationship of the companies and their leaders from Brad Stone and Miguel Helft, “Apple’s Spat with Google Is Getting Personal,” The New York Times, March 12, 2010.

  239 Keyhole Randall Stross gives a detailed account of the Google Keyhole arrangement in Planet Google.

  241 legal research services Debra Cassens Weiss, “Google Offers Legal Research for the Average Citizen—and Lawyers, Too,” ABA Journal, November 18, 2009.

  241 computer language Robert Griesemer et al., “Hey, Ho, Let’s Go,” Google Open Source Blog, November 10, 2009.

  242 a Google event Brin and Schmidt’s comments came at the September 2008 Google Zeitgeist Conference.

  243 In February 2005 Background on YouTube draws from John Cloud, “The Gurus of YouTube,” Time, December 16, 2006; Stross, Planet Google; and the Newsweek reporting of my colleague Brad Stone.

  243 Matt Harding Harding’s website is www.wherethehellismatt.com.

  243 In an email The emails cited in this section were exhibits released in Viacom International et al, v. YouTube, Inc., et al.

  244 “Response has been great” Interview with author, 2005.

  245 In December 2005 Feikin’s email of December 12, 2008, had the subject header “Search Terms.”

  245 “Lazy Sunday” John Biggs, “A Video Clip Goes Viral, and a TV Network Wants to Control It,” The New York Times, February 20, 2006.

  247 In an August 2005 video Another treasure from the Viacom suit, labeled SUF 50.

  248 “It’s just my judgment” Schmidt deposition, May 6, 2009. The deposition was released in the Viacom litigation, but CNET’s Greg Sandoval managed to get a copy first; see Sandoval, “Schmidt: We paid $1 billion premium for YouTube,” CNET, October 6, 2009.

  254 “This is all off the cuff” Thomas Goetz, “Sergey Brin’s Search for Parkinson’s Cure,” Wired, July 2010.

  255 “The Axman Comes” Adam Lashinsky, “The Axman comes to Google,” Fortune, March 23, 2009.

  256 This led to the closing The memo from Laszlo Bock announcing the food cutbacks was reprinted in Owen Thomas, “Food Fight,” Valleywag, September 4, 2008.

  257 3 million shares Saul Hansell, “Google Earmarks $265 Million for Charity and Social Causes,” The New York Times, October 12, 2005.

  261 One widely circulated report Spencer Wang and Kenneth Sena, “Deep Dive into YouTube; 1Q09 Preview,” Credit Suisse, April 3, 2009.

  263 “Fred” Chris Albrecht, “‘Fred’ Cranks Up the YouTube Views and Ad Dollars,” GigaOM, November 18, 2008; Ada Calhoun, “‘Fred’’s Lucas Cruikshank Building a Tween Empire,” Los Angeles Times, September 16, 2010.

  265 Advertisers were paying for Google has always been parsimonious with YouTube’s numbers, but in 2009, it announced that every day it served a billion videos (Chad Hurley, “Y,000,000,000uTube,” YouTube Blog, October 9, 2009), and every week a billion of those were associated with paid ads (CFO Patrick Pichette at Google’s October 15, 2009, earnings call). Both those numbers doubled the next year.

  265 “a million quality broadcasts” Google’s attempt to move the center of gravity to the Internet would be a culmination of a trend that had been in the making since the mid-1990s, when the Internet emerged. In an article I wrote entitled “How the Propeller Heads Stole the Internet Future” (The New York Times Magazine, September 24, 1995), I quoted Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale: “If there is a market for 500 channels,” he told me, “imagine the market for 5 million, 50 million, 500 million!” In October 2010, Google put YouTube and Kamangar in charge of Google TV in the hope of finally realizing that vision.

  265 Google TV When Google TV did launch in the fall of 2010, it did not appear in Blu-Ray disk players, but it was available in Logitech devices and inside television sets, in particular a new Sony TV.

  Part Six: GuGe

  273 Chinese Firewall Oliver August, “The Great Firewall: China’s Misguided—and Futile—Attempt to Control What Happens Online,” Wired, November 2007; James Fallows, “The Connection Has Been Reset,” The Atlantic, March 2008; Danny Sullivan, “China’s Great Wall Against Google and AltaVista,” Search Engine Report, September 16, 2002.

  273 “Pretty much every possible” Brin discussed Google’s political problems with me in 2002.

  273 “Evil is what Sergey says” McHugh, “Google vs. Evil.”

  274 Left unspoken Malseed, “The Story of Sergey Brin,” Moment. Some of Malseed’s work is repeated in The Google Story.

  274 “Much of that time” Adam Tanner, “Google Co-founder Lives Modestly, Émigré Dad Says.”

  274 “Just applying to leave” Sergey Brin, “Journey of a Lifetime,” Too (blog), October 25, 2009.

/>   275 Jew Watch When I called Google for comment on Jew Watch in 2004, Brin got on the line himself to explain.

  276 China Of several overviews of Google’s China experience, two of the most helpful were Clive Thompson, “The Big Disconnect,” The New York Times Magazine, April 23, 2006; and Jason Dean and Kevin Delaney, “As Google Pushes into China, It Faces Clashes with Censors,” The Wall Street Journal, December 16, 2005.

  278 “have been more like” “Google Search Fails to Throw Up Monkeys,” The Times of India, October 13, 2004.

  278 CEO Robin Li held Brad Stone, “How Baidu Won China” Bloomberg Business Week, November 11, 2010.

  279 “We actually did an ‘evil scale’” Stacy Cowley, “Google CEO on Censoring: ‘We Did an Evil Scale.” Computerworld, January 27, 2006.

  280 “China Entry Plan” Dean and Delaney, “As Google Pushes into China.”

  281 Kai-Fu Lee An extensive treatment of Kai-Fu Lee’s move from Microsoft to Google can be found in the Robert Buderi and Gregory T. Huang, Guanxi (The Art of Relationships): Microsoft, China, and Bill Gates’s Plan to Win the Road Ahead (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006). I also drew from the unpublished English version of Kai-Fu Lee’s autobiography, Making a World of Difference: The Kai-Fu Lee Story (Beijing: China Citic Press, 2009), sent to me by Lee.

  282 “Do you mind if I stretch?” Lee, Making a World of Difference.

  282 “Those two kids are crazy” Ibid.

  283 “Just tell me it’s not Google” Declaration of Mark Lucovsky, quoted in Ina Fried, “Court Docs: Ballmer Vowed to Kill Google,” CNET, September 5, 2005.

  283 On Google’s official blog Andrew McLaughlin, “Google in China,” Official Google Blog, January 27, 2006.

  284 “[T]he first page of results” Thompson, “The Big Disconnect.” Thompson’s article is an excellent overview of Google’s China experience to that point.

  284 Christopher Smith I spoke to Lantos and Smith for “Google and the China Syndrome,” Newsweek, February 13, 2006, and attended the February 15 congressional hearing.

  285 the Internet and China The transcript of the hearing can be found at www.foreignaffairs.house.gov/archives/109/26075.pdf.

  288 In a poll Jonathan Watts, “How Google Became a Rude Word in China,” The Guardian, April 29, 2006.

  288 To celebrate the new name Associated Press, “Google Defends China Policy,” Wired News, April 12, 2006.

  289 “We will take” Kai-Fu Lee shared this quote in a February 1, 2008, lecture to students at Carnegie Mellon. It can be viewed on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgDGNPnb124.

  292 Robin Li Background of Li and Baidu drawn in part from David Baroba, “The Rise of Baidu (That’s Chinese for Google),” The New York Times, September 17, 2006, and Jonathan Watts, “The Man Behind China’s Answer to Google: Accused by Critics of Piracy and Censorship,” The Guardian, December 8, 2005.

  292 Its name was drawn Ruiyan Xu, “Search Engine of the Song Dynasty,” The New York Times, May 14, 2010.

  297 Sanlu Group “Public Relations Company Sanlu Letter,” 21st Century Business Herald, September 13, 2008, and “Kidney Stone Gate: Fake Baby Milk Powder, Sanu & Baidu?” chinaSMACK, September 12, 2008. Though it was not covered extensively in the Western press, users of Chinese forums posted scanned letters from a Chinese PR firm advising Sanlu to use Baidu’s “corporate news and information management service” to suppress results about the “Kidney Stone Gate” scandal, along with screen grabs of Baidu results indicating that earlier Baidu search results on the issue were no longer available.

  299 interactive snowstorm map Qiushuang (Autumn) Zhang, Google Lat Long Blog, January 31, 2008.

  302 In September 2009, Luk told In September 2009, I visited Google’s Beijing office for a week of interviews.

  304 search engines, including Microsoft’s agreed New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof has made an issue of Microsoft’s worldwide Chinese-language filtering to appease the Chinese censors. Microsoft objected to Kristof’s characterization that it censored its Chinese search results worldwide, but his own testing over a period of months indicated otherwise. See his “Boycott Microsoft Bing,” The New York Times, November 20, 2009.

  306 Li Changchun James Glanz and John Markoff, “Vast Hacking by a China Fearful of the Web,” The New York Times, December 4, 2010. The Times article reported Li as the official whose name was excised in a May 9, 2009, U.S. State Department cable from the Beijing embassy to the secretary of state. This was one of several cables released to certain press sources by WikiLeaks that had relevance to Google’s activities in China, with information that confirmed, and in a few cases added to, my reporting on the difficulties between Google and the Chinese government.

  308 Apparently someone had hacked into Google Google has been circumspect on the details of the attack, but Adkins shared an overview at the June 15, 2010, Forum of Incident Response Security Teams (FIRST) Conference in Miami. An account of her speech appears in Robert Westervelt, “How Google Used DNS Log Analysis to Investigate Aurora Attacks,” SearchSecurity.com, June 17, 2010. Google has implicitly acknowledged the veracity of other accounts, including that in John Markoff, “Cyberattack on Google Said to Hit Password System,” The New York Times, April 19, 2010.

  310 the company invited Ellen Nakashima, “Google to Enlist NSA to Help It Ward Off Cyberattacks,” The Washington Post, February 4, 2010.

  310 In interviews afterward Jessica E. Vascellaro, “Brin Drove Google’s Pullback,” The Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2010; Steve Lohr, “Interview: Sergey Brin on Google’s China Move,” The New York Times (Bits Blog), March 22, 2010. Brin also addressed the issue at the TED 2010 conference.

  311 The next day Drummond wrote David Drummond, “A New Approach to China,” Official Google Blog, January 12, 2010.

  313 “We are certainly benefiting” Baidu Inc. Q1 2010 Earnings Call Transcript, www.seekingalpha.com, April 30, 2010.

  313 someone familiar with the report Glanz and Markoff, “Vast Hacking.” The New York Times source was elaborating on a report whose existence was revealed by one of the State Department cables exposed by Wikileaks.

  Part Seven: Google.gov

  315 “the main building” Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006), p. 139.

  315 “The image was mesmerizing” Ibid., pp. 140–41.

  317 “Bush would not” Peter Norvig, “Hiring a President,” www.norvig.com, June 2004.

  319 Google employees Information about corporate contributions from www.opensecrets.org.

  320 He saw his mission Dan Siroker, “How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election—Dan Siroker at Google,” presentation at Google. Available on YouTube.

  321 Sonal Shah “Sonal Shah,” WhoRunsGov.com (The Washington Post), August 15, 2010.

  323 By the time Obama agreed Sogol Tehranizadeh, “Obama Takes Town Hall Meeting Online,” www.examiner.com/los-angeles, March 26, 2009.

  324 “Working in government” Quoted in Jake Brewer, “Bringing Local Government to the 21st Century,” Huffington Post, January 28, 2010.

  326 Another was the success The work can be seen on the Data.gov website.

  327 The Google Fiber for Communities project Minnie Ingersoll and James Kelly, “Think Big with a Gig: Our Experimental Fiber Network,” Official Google Blog, February 10, 2010.

  327 The emails were innocuous Nancy Scola, “White House Deputy CTO Slapped for Gmailing with Googlers,” www.techpresident.com, May 17, 2010.

  328 Italian officials filed criminal charges Matt Sucherman, “Serious Threat to the Web in Italy,” Official Google Blog, February 24, 2010.

  329 In 2006, Davidson lured Arshad Mohammed and Sara Kehaulani Goo, “Google Is a Tourist in D.C., Brin Finds,” The Washington Post, June 7, 2006.

  329 twelve lobbyists on staff Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, “Learning from Microsoft’s Error, Google Builds a Lobbying Engine,” The Washington Post, June 20, 2007.

 
; 331 Google paid $3.1 billion Louise Story and Miguel Helft, “Google Buys Double-Click for $3.1 Billion,” The New York Times, April 14, 2007.

  332 On September 17, 2007 Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, One Hundred Tenth Congress, First Session, “Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Antitrust Competition Policy and Consumer Rights,” September 27, 2007.

  334 “New enhancements” Rajas Moonka, “New Enhancements on the Google Content Network,” Official Google Blog, August 7, 2008.

  336 “Google search,” it said Jessica E. Vascellaro, “Google Agonizes on Privacy as Ad World Vaults Ahead,” The Wall Street Journal, August 10, 2010. This was part of an excellent series on web privacy. Google said that the memo was a speculative document that had not been presented to senior executives. Overall, however, Vascellaro’s reporting on Larry Page’s flip-flop on cookies conformed with my own findings.