The Google Guys (9 page)

Competitors, however, generally claim that Page Rank was no big deal. Says Robert Davis, the former CEO of the search engine Lycos, “A lot of people talk about their great technology, and frankly, I think that had little to do with their success. PageRank was not that innovative. Lycos did the same thing; it was the core of Lycos's technology.”

Eric Brewer, a computer science professor at UC Berkeley who was one of the creators of the search engine Inktomi, echoes those thoughts. “Most of what is written about Google is inaccurate. For one, that PageRank was what made them successful. It's a lot of hogwash. It's very important to have an invention and market it, but it's just marketing.”

This view has some merit. At the very least, PageRank wasn't the only thing that put Google ahead. There's always an element of luck involved in any successful start-up, and Larry and Sergey had their share. For one, they walked into a huge vacuum in the market, and were buoyed by their own hubris and single-minded obsession. They had complete faith that search alone would make a great company at a time when every other company that professed to do search was giving up on it.

The problem was that nobody had figured out how to commercialize a search engine. The prevailing view was that the flaw of a search engine was that it simply sent users away from their sites—and the ads they hoped visitors would click on. This started the age of “portals,” a misnomer that implies a door to the Internet but was really something of a “walled garden” in which searchers would (the companies hoped) linger before heading off to other sites. All of the portals, including AOL and Yahoo, focused instead on providing as much content in their portals as possible. They had no incentive to build a better search engine and had largely given up on trying to improve the technology.

Larry and Sergey knew that this was the wrong approach. To them, finding the right information through a search engine is much more important than having a single portal trying to produce all the content that meets users' needs. The other search engines, said Sergey, “lost sight of that. It's why we started Google in the first place . . . . We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible.”
⁴

Andrew Anker, cofounder of Wired Digital, which created the HotBot search engine (he's now at blogging company Six Apart), puts it another way: “The lucky thing for Google is that the others messed up.”

True, but how did Larry and Sergey avoid messing up? By following their ideas of what a search engine should be, without compromise. Some of the things they did were quite simple, and quite by accident. These included creating a clean, spare home page with nothing on it but a search box and thirteen words. “The end result is it became a wonderful consumer experience,” says Davis. “It was clean, it was quick, it was easy.”

Web design expert Jakob Nielsen had been preaching for years that this was exactly how Web pages should be designed, because most people are lost in a maze of confusing technology, and they pine for simplicity. Even today, most professional Web sites are so cluttered with ads, pictures and video, and busy text that it's hard to find what you're looking for. Simplicity is one of the differences that make products from Google and Apple so popular.

The early team at Google quickly learned how important a simple design was. Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience, describes in a company blog entry an unusual response she started getting from one Google fan. Late one night in the summer of 2000, she came across an e-mail that consisted of just a number: 37. She had no idea what it meant. So she searched through her e-mails to see what other mail that person had sent. They were all single numbers: 33, 53, and then one that she found very telling: “61, getting a bit heavy, aren't we?” The first e-mail added a comment: “What happened to the days of 13?” She also realized that each message arrived on the day she launched changes in the home page. The e-mailer was counting words on the page and complaining that it was getting too cluttered.

Mayer thought she was doing everything she could to keep the home page simple, but she had never thought to count the words. That has been her approach ever since. The current number is 28. Larry and Sergey now insist that this is the maximum they will allow. In the summer of 2008, Mayer wanted to add the word
privacy
as a link to the company's privacy policy. But, she writes in her blog, “Larry and Sergey told me we could only add this to the homepage if we took a word away—keeping the ‘weight' of the homepage unchanged at 28.” She looked at the copyright line at the bottom of the page and decided to drop the word
Google
, since the owner of the copyright was obvious.

The important thing is that Mayer and other senior employees know what Larry and Sergey want, and know that the duo's final decision on any important issue is usually the right one. No other search engine even tried the spare approach to Web design until Google showed them the way. And once Sergey and Larry found that it worked, they carried it through to every search results page—something that virtually no other Web site has found the need to do. Just try typing
www.yahoo.com
and
www.google.com
into a browser and compare the results.

This simple idea is part of another quirk Larry and Sergey have: putting their users' needs ahead of everything else. It's rule number one that Larry and Sergey list under the heading “Our Philosophy” on the company Web site: “Focus on the user and everything else will follow.” Larry and Sergey knew what people on the Internet hated—ads disguised as search results; intrusive pop-up ads; messy and noisy Web sites. Offering more of the same would simply not serve the interests of their users.

It's a cliché to promise that the customer always comes first. Any corporate executive you ask will claim this philosophy as his company's own. But the sad truth is that amazingly few follow it. Ask anyone who has waited for a cable company to get her system running, or wandered the aisles of a superstore looking for the item she wanted to buy, or sat on hold for an hour waiting for a customer support staff that has been cut back because business is slowing in a bad economy. Most retail stores follow a different philosophy. They study what items people tend to buy together, from bread and peanut butter to tissues and makeup, in order to figure out how to arrange these items most effectively on the shelves. But effectiveness is not measured by how efficiently customers can find the items. It's measured in how long it takes customers to wander the aisles in search of what they want, under the premise that the longer people wander the store, the more likely they are to find and buy something they didn't know they wanted. Larry and Sergey are dedicated to a simple idea: making things simple and straightforward.

Seemingly, the focus on users comes at the expense of advertisers. Larry and Sergey insist that the site sports a limited number of ads, and that each must be limited to a few lines of text with no multimedia enhancements. That is for the benefit of users. It's another way to keep the site simple and allow users to focus on what they came to do—find great search results.

But it turned out to be great for advertisers as well, contrary to conventional wisdom. Restricting the number of ads and making them easy to see makes each ad stand out more and gets people to click on them more often. Many critics insist that most Google users can't tell the difference between ads and search results. This drove up the bids on ad placements, creating an unexpectedly rich revenue stream for Google.

At the time Google was launched, the other search engines made the ads as intrusive as possible, displaying as many flashing, animated, and obtrusive features as they could cram in—a technique that most professional Web sites still employ today. The ads are a big part of the reason many Web sites today are slow to load. And people are more likely to shut off the ability to play multimedia ads or graphics altogether than to click on them.

Monier asserts that this philosophy made a big difference in Google's appeal. “That is absolutely the success,” he says. “Search is about speed. It's a utility, it's a service, something that should be easy, available, very fast. All those things they've done. They've not compromised. By insisting on that approach, that's how they came up with the formula for advertising.”

At first, many of these decisions made no sense whatsoever to Google's venture backers. The venture capital community is a small and gossipy group. Several have told me over the years that Google's backers—in particular Mike Moritz—have fought with Larry and Sergey over these decisions. (John Doerr and Mike Moritz turned down requests for interviews for this book.) Just like any executives at a successful company, VCs get set in their ways and develop a formula for how to grow a company, and Larry and Sergey threw away the formula. Limit the number of advertisers? That was sure to be a move that would decrease revenues. But since Larry and Sergey had kept a controlling interest in the company to themselves, there was little the VCs could do about it.

The venture capitalists had one card to play to get Larry and Sergey under control. When they funded Google, the one concession they got was that the company would have to hire a seasoned executive as CEO. But the boys dithered on that promise for as long as possible. Frustrated, Moritz threatened to pull Sequoia's funding if Google did not conform. He later admitted to
GQ
, “It was not a pleasant conversation. In the heat of things, I rattled m y saber loudly.”
⁵

In a 2000 interview, Sergey described the type of CEO they were seeking. “The model we look for is [
Amazon.com
founder and CEO] Jeff Bezos. He's very smart. He's a good motivator. Larry's better than I am [at that], and Jeff is better than he is. He's very fun, very pleasant to be around.”
⁶

Finally, in 2001, they found Eric Schmidt, a forty-six-year-old CEO at Novell and a man cut largely from the same cloth as Larry and Sergey.

Schmidt is a light-haired, mild-mannered, extremely smart man with a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences from UC Berkeley. He wears John Lennon spectacles and looks like Lennon's nerdy opposite. Unlike Larry and Sergey, he also has poise, eloquence, and a relaxed, self-deprecating demeanor.

Schmidt first met Larry in 2000, at the PC Forum industry conference, when they appeared on a panel discussion together. Larry presented search results to show off Google, but Schmidt was unimpressed. “He was very shy,” Schmidt recalls. “A nice enough person, but what I remember most was thinking that search engines are not very interesting and that he was shy. I clearly did not understand anything at the time of what was going to happen.”

His first encounter with Sergey was over the phone. Sergey called him in October of 2000 because an employee they wanted to hire, Wayne Rosing, had listed Schmidt as a reference. The conversation started at 9:00 P.M. and went on for fifty minutes. “I had never had a reference check go on for fifty minutes,” Schmidt says, laughing. “Sergey was enormously interested in Wayne, but I remember noting that, just in general, he had this enormous curiosity.”

That same month, Schmidt ran into Google investor and board member John Doerr, who informed him that Schmidt was on the short list to take over the CEO job at Google. Schmidt, who was CEO of Novell at the time, told Doerr he wasn't interested. Doerr kept insisting that he meet with Larry and Sergey.

Finally, Schmidt took Sergey up on an offer to visit them at their office. Schmidt agreed, he says, “just out of curiosity.” He went to their headquarters, which was at the time, ironically, in an old Sun Microsystems building. The visit wasn't what he had expected. There was food on a little table and a projection of Schmidt's biography on the wall. “I thought, well, that's pretty interesting,” Schmidt says. “It was not the normal way I had been dealt with in my career. It was one of those things in life you know is just different. Interesting and different.”

The conversation was even more interesting. Schmidt didn't know that the meeting was a job interview, and it didn't seem like one. They debated many issues in technology, including a project under way at Novell to make a market for storage services for video, “which they thought was pretty stupid,” says Schmidt. “They didn't say that but they basically argued against the premise.” Their argument was there was a huge amount of fiber-optic cable lying unused since the dot-com crash, and if someone started using that cable on the Internet, video could be streamed live, thus eliminating the need for temporary storage. “I left feeling that something interesting was going to happen,” Schmidt says.

At the end of 2001, Schmidt agreed to merge Novell with the information technology company Cambridge Technology Partners, and decided to step down as CEO, which left him free to join Google. He and Larry and Sergey negotiated through January. “Larry and Sergey seemed strange. They argued over all sorts of strange things. Every question was interesting, and every question was debated.”

Although he did not understand Google's potential at the time, and insists he would have been happy if it had remained a small company, Schmidt decided to accept the offer. “I made the decision based on their precociousness,” he says. “I had this tremendous sense that I wanted to stay because it was just so interesting. It was obvious that I should join Google.”

Larry and Sergey insisted on spending a lot of time with any CEO candidate, which meant taking Schmidt skiing for a day. Schmidt thought this was ridiculous, and agreed to meet them at the Il Fornaio restaurant in Palo Alto instead. To test their knowledge, he compiled a list of questions that a CEO should know the answers to. The dinner lasted three hours. “They had good answers for everything,” he says.