# The Google Story ## Metadata * Author: [David A. Vise and Mark Malseed](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B000FCKIXW * ISBN: 1509889213 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FCKIXW * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW) ## Highlights “When I was heading up Google X a few years back, one little project we had in there was Google Brain, which was an AI [artificial intelligence] effort,” Sergey said. “I didn’t pay attention to it at all. Having been trained as a computer scientist in the ’90s, everyone knew AI didn’t work. Fast-forward a few years and Brain touches every single one of our main products from search to photos to ads to everything we do. And this kind of revolution definitely surprised me.” — location: [153](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=153) ^ref-52984 --- The tough part is whether we can do it for the long-term, a 10-to-20-year-old company, or whether we will be overtaken.” — location: [453](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=453) ^ref-26273 --- The presence of venture capitalists in the neighborhood made it easier for students and professors at Stanford to get funding and advice than for their peers at — location: [651](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=651) ^ref-38588 --- any other university. By allowing faculty to own a stake in companies — location: [652](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=652) ^ref-58345 --- and cash in from time to time, Stanford also retained many of — location: [652](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=652) ^ref-62758 --- its most accomplished professors. Some of them became multimillionaires, and had fun in the process. — location: [653](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=653) ^ref-24905 --- looked for several things: ideas that solved real problems he could understand; businesses with the potential to produce real profits; and bright, passionate, and capable founders. — location: [880](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=880) ^ref-36897 --- spent it on advertising,” Bechtolsheim said. “They believed in word of mouth. This was the opposite approach. Build something of value and deliver a service compelling enough that people would just use it.” — location: [891](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=891) ^ref-40994 --- Cheriton’s matchmaking that morning on his porch had been a success. The pair of twentysomethings were so excited that they went off to celebrate by eating at Burger King. The endorsement — location: [912](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=912) ^ref-41486 --- Andy Bechtolsheim, — location: [915](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=915) ^ref-36853 --- What Brin was explaining now was how Moore’s Law applied to building a search engine to survey the entire Internet. — location: [972](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=972) ^ref-54899 --- “At the same time that people are generating all this text and stuff, disks are getting a lot faster. We will be able to put all human knowledge, and any information people generate, into your pocket, excluding video feeds, in the next couple decades,” — location: [973](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=973) ^ref-26818 --- They had a target in mind: becoming dominant in search, at the exact time that others were abandoning it and even derisively calling it a commodity. The two remained steadfast in their belief that search — location: [1098](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1098) ^ref-44102 --- both John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins and Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital had grown tired of watching an endless — location: [1131](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1131) ^ref-2634 --- David Cheriton, a confidant of the venture capitalists, — location: [1141](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1141) ^ref-1159 --- Jeff Bezos, who was both an early investor and an informal advisor to Brin and Page. — location: [1184](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1184) ^ref-23154 --- Mayer was not impressed. She thought it looked terrible, “clip arty.” “Put it up on the site,” Sergey said. “You want me to put this on the site?” Mayer said. “Do you see that I can see the o?” One of the pumpkins wasn’t properly centered, making some of the red letter below it visible. Brin responded, “We are all here, excited for Halloween. We should show people in the world that people at Google care about Halloween.” — location: [1320](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1320) ^ref-26583 --- The Monet logo, still one of Hwang’s favorites, was another success, and began a tradition of commemorating artists’ birthdays with doodles. The portfolio has since expanded to include scientists, famous discoveries, even the occasional entertainer. Not all were greeted kindly: the estate of Salvador Dalí made Google take down a Dalí doodle a few hours into the run. But overwhelmingly, the doodles evolved into a treat for users around the world, some of whom came back to the site day after day just to see if there was a new one. “Logos touch people,” Mayer said. — location: [1340](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1340) ^ref-15754 --- “We put two people at each computer, so they’d talk to each other instead of talking to us,” Mayer explained. The testers were — location: [1370](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1370) ^ref-4067 --- told to use Google to find the answer to a trivia question: Which country won the most gold medals in the 1994 Olympics? They typed www.google.com, watched the homepage come up on the screen, and then they waited. Fifteen seconds went by…twenty seconds…forty-five. Mayer wondered what was going on, but didn’t want to interfere. Finally, she asked them, What are you waiting for? The rest of the page to load, they answered. The same thing kept happening all day, Mayer recalled. “The Web was so full of things that moved and flashed and blinked and made you punch the monkey that they were waiting for the rest of it to show up.” From that inauspicious start, Mayer’s team concluded they had to beef up the copyright notice and footers at the bottom of the page, not for legal reasons but to let users know “That is it, that is everything. Please start searching.” Mayer’s team learned a lot that day about other ways to improve Google’s homepage. One tester wondered aloud whether Google was a legitimate company because the Web site looked so unpolished. — location: [1371](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1371) ^ref-58534 --- They no longer needed to scour the Stanford loading docks for computers. They had graduated to the next level: hopping in the car and driving to Fry’s, a giant Silicon Valley — location: [1388](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1388) ^ref-61812 --- “We want to get the most computational power per dollar that we can,” said Jeffrey Dean, one of several engineers Google plucked that — location: [1392](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1392) ^ref-32058 --- year from the lab that had spawned the AltaVista search engine. — location: [1393](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1393) ^ref-49440 --- Dean and other Googlers from this era love to tell the story of how they cobbled together a virtual supercomputer from cheap, commodity PCs. Rather than spending $800,000 on a high-end system from IBM, — location: [1393](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1393) ^ref-42849 --- Those savings gave Google a significant edge over competitors, even those able to match them dollar for dollar in capital spending. For every dollar spent, Google had three times more computing power than its competitors. — location: [1396](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1396) ^ref-64569 --- Given the number of computers Google was using, several were destined to fail each day. Sergey and Larry elected to deal with the constant failures through software, bypassing any machines that died rather than manually removing and replacing them. — location: [1401](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1401) ^ref-65340 --- Dr. Reese the brain surgeon could monitor the entire precious network — location: [1406](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1406) ^ref-35101 --- This was a money-saver for Reese and his team, but as electricity costs soared, some of the data centers went bankrupt and Google was forced to lug its computers elsewhere. After doing this once or twice, they made sure their computer racks were outfitted with wheels. — location: [1410](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1410) ^ref-27046 --- The value of having multiple copies of everything became clear when a fire broke out in one of Google’s data centers. Larry and Sergey weren’t at Burning Man anymore. This was the real deal. As six fire trucks doused the blaze, Google’s redundant systems took over, enabling it to continue delivering rapid results. Google had proven itself reliable, and tens of thousands of information-hungry computer users had no idea that anything had even gone wrong. — location: [1417](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1417) ^ref-1045 --- Sullivan sold Search Engine Watch to JupiterMedia, a leading online market research and news network, but — location: [1449](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1449) ^ref-9272 --- “The original business idea was aimed at licensing the underlying search engine technology to a variety of other Internet companies and enterprises,” said Sequoia’s Michael Moritz. “During the first year we collectively had concern that the market we were pursuing was more difficult and more intractable than we had originally anticipated. — location: [1462](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1462) ^ref-25583 --- toward ads, to ensure that they didn’t make any mistakes. They became persuaded that, just as there was a clear distinction between news stories and ads in newspapers, they could achieve the same thing on Google.com. But they hated to clutter the clean interface that had been its calling card from the start, so they kept the homepage free of ads, and they developed strict standards for the size and type of ads they would display elsewhere. They decided also to have a bright line on the results page that separated the free search results from the ads, which they would label “Sponsored Links.” — location: [1524](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1524) ^ref-25701 --- That way, nobody could argue that the search results were combined with the ads, yet the ads would be clicked on more often under the heading “Sponsored Links” than if they were simply labeled “Ads.” At the start, Google priced its ads the way traditional media companies did, based on the size of the audience. After talking it over with various experts, and testing different screen layouts, they decided to display the ads in a clearly marked box above the free search results. They wanted the user to have a good experience, so there would be no pop-ups or other graphics that would interfere with a Google search. The ads were to be brief and look identical—just a headline, a link, and a short, haiku-like description. Initially they were sold one by one, mostly to larger businesses that could afford hefty ad campaigns. But by utilizing their own technology, they soon moved to a model that enabled advertisers to sign up easily online themselves. This cut costs, brought midsize businesses into the fold, and gave Google an edge over similar services that had a lag between the time advertisers submitted copy and when the ads appeared. Text ads could be up and running on Google within minutes after a company provided its credit card number. — location: [1528](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1528) ^ref-7456 --- “The difference was that they understood you had to separate the editorial results from the paid results,” Sullivan said. “And they always separated them.” — location: [1541](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1541) ^ref-18262 --- As the months passed, Brin and Page had another breakthrough idea: ranking ads based on relevance, as they did their free search results. Instead of merely displaying an ad from the vendor willing to pay the most, Google ranked its ads based on a formula that took into account both how much someone offered to pay and how frequently computer users clicked on the ad. More-popular ads rose to the top; less-popular ones drifted downward. — location: [1542](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1542) ^ref-2033 --- Brin and Page reasoned that the ads clicked on the most frequently were the — location: [1545](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1545) ^ref-22436 --- most relevant. In other words, they trusted their users to rank the ads. It was consumer pull, rather than business push, that would determine where ads appeared. — location: [1546](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1546) ^ref-45516 that is the key innovation séparation and ranking but not by link like page rank but by user click. relevance win for results applied then to YouTube and other like play store and maps. find what to rank on. --- “Making sure you showed the most relevant ads was a nice public relations kind of thing,” Sullivan said. “You can go out and say, ‘Our ads are more relevant because people are clicking on them.’ ” Sullivan also pointed out that Google would profit more by putting the most popular ads higher on the list, where they would be seen and clicked on by even more people. “This approach to advertising was home-grown at Google,” he said. — location: [1547](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1547) ^ref-43237 --- the company’s ability to make it as a business that gave search results away for free and refused to accept both banner ads and paid placement in search results. — location: [1563](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1563) ^ref-60076 --- December of 2000, BusinessWeek ran a story under the headline, “Will Google’s Purity Pay Off?” — location: [1565](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1565) ^ref-43185 find this article --- Brin and Page had spent judiciously when building the computer infrastructure that powered its business, but they spared no expense when it came to creating the right culture inside the Googleplex and cultivating strong loyalty and job satisfaction among Googlers. The — location: [1593](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1593) ^ref-40720 --- BY EARLY 2001, Google was performing a staggering 100 million searches per day—1,000 every second. It was also entering the American lexicon as a verb, — location: [1673](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1673) ^ref-52080 --- trend documented by a New York Observer article that chronicled New Yorkers googling each other before dates. Though less frequently discussed, ego or vanity searches—people googling themselves—were also on the rise. It was human nature. To many people, a validation of their importance rested upon showing up in a Google search. — location: [1675](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1675) ^ref-13290 --- advertising program? The answer is Google’s unique approach,” they said. “Google runs only keyword-targeted text ads. That means you don’t see the ad unless you’re searching for information on that specific topic. And because there are no animated banners competing for attention, the — location: [1685](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1685) ^ref-30143 --- text ads are read carefully by users, who frequently find them to be as valuable as the actual search results.” How would Google capitalize on this trend to become — location: [1687](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1687) ^ref-22436 --- the company’s ads coming from? The answer provided a road map for a new ad sales strategy. While 60 percent of its search requests came from outside the United States, the company earned only 5 percent of its revenue from ads that originated outside North America. The Google Guys had put tremendous emphasis on global branding and making Google searches readily available in foreign languages, but they had done nothing specifically to generate ad sales abroad. — location: [1699](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1699) ^ref-46457 --- When terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, Google’s search traffic surged. “Many important news sites were overloaded by heavy traffic and could not serve an information-starved public,” Brin and Page noted. “Google did its best to fill the void by putting up cached — location: [1720](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1720) ^ref-19730 --- and Google continues to maintain an extensive set of links to major news sources around the world.” On routine days, and on those of extraordinary events as well, Google was woven into the fabric of American culture—and increasingly, with its availability in 66 languages, the global community as well. As the end-of-the-year numbers — location: [1723](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1723) ^ref-38653 --- Michael Moritz, — location: [1729](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1729) ^ref-4041 --- Page got their wish in 2001. With a stack of text ads now running to the right of Google’s search results, giving users more options to click, the stream of revenue from searches that year was enough to earn Google its first annual profit. It amounted to $7 million. — location: [1735](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1735) ^ref-52395 --- Google was nothing more than a search engine at a time when the buzz in Silicon Valley was that search engines were dead and the all-inclusive Web portal was the business model of choice. Schmidt believed in the gospel — location: [1753](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1753) ^ref-46030 --- Two things helped bring the deal in for a landing. First, Schmidt showed his commitment by agreeing to pay $1 million of his own money to buy preferred stock in Google. — location: [1837](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1837) ^ref-18643 --- from Doerr — location: [1878](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1878) ^ref-31731 --- That spring, it adopted a new policy of charging advertisers only when their ads were clicked. It was designed to give them greater control over how much they spent on ads. — location: [1925](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1925) ^ref-59412 --- Turning traditional advertising on its head, these ad buyers determined the price they were willing to pay to get across their message, rather than having Google set the price, as TV networks and newspapers had long done. — location: [1958](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1958) ^ref-62900 --- The self-service nature of the system and the low minimum ad prices enabled even small firms with no sales staff to jump in and out of the game. On — location: [1959](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1959) ^ref-23369 --- An old adage was that companies typically spent twice as much as necessary on advertising but had no way to figure out which half to cut. Google saw this as yet another problem it could remedy through clever technology. Click-based pricing of ads made it easier for firms to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns, since they could track whether users who clicked on particular ads turned into buyers. (Clicking on an ad typically took a computer user to an Internet page where a purchase could be made.) If the ads were converting to sales, a company could increase the amount it was willing to bid or expand its campaign; if the ads were ineffective, they could be adjusted downward or pulled entirely. — location: [1961](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1961) ^ref-60981 --- Google ranks ads based on two factors: the price a company is willing to pay and how frequently computer users click on the ad. Thus, even if a company outbids others on a particular keyword, if consumers are not clicking on the company’s ad, it will move down to a less prominent spot. Yahoo, by contrast, guaranteed that the highest bidders for a word would show up at the top of the list of sponsored ads. Yahoo is “strictly capitalistic—pay more and you are number one,” said Dana Todd, an executive with an interactive ad agency. “Google has — location: [1971](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1971) ^ref-20302 --- Advertising on Google proved to be an extremely efficient way for firms to reach potential customers. Google offered narrowcasting, not broadcasting—it tried to reach the consumer at the point of decision about buying a product, rather than plastering ads — location: [1976](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1976) ^ref-44084 --- Over time, the number of sites with a Google search box would grow to a staggering 25,000, forming a money-generating network that was exceedingly difficult for anyone to replicate. — location: [1995](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=1995) ^ref-55256 --- Traditional metrics used to gauge the popularity and profitability of a business missed the dynamic, self-reinforcing nature of Google’s global network of users and advertisers, in part because the unconventional business model didn’t lend itself to standard static analysis. Google was more like a snowball rolling down a black diamond ski slope, gaining in momentum, size, and velocity along the way. — location: [2034](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=2034) ^ref-2052 --- a fast-growing market, he said, it was better to work together to grow the market than to kill competitors and shrink the market.” Google also allowed Ask Jeeves, before proceeding, to test its ad delivery system on a pilot basis. Berkowitz liked the results, and began to view Google as a partner rather than as the enemy. But — location: [2122](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=2122) ^ref-34760 --- new ideas typically was frowned upon, making it difficult for entrepreneurial employees, who often found they had to work on them in secret, without their boss’s knowledge. At Google, the 20 percent approach sent the opposite message—spend one day a week on something you, not your boss, are passionate about, and don’t worry about such pedestrian matters as whether the idea could be a moneymaker or something that could be turned into a successful product. In other words, please yourself. This 20 percent rule was unusual in modern business, but it did have a precedent. Many years earlier, 3M, the company behind the consumer brand Scotch tape, developed a 15 percent rule to spur innovation by directing its engineers to spend a portion of their paid time on projects of their own choosing. For 3M, the extra time to dream yielded, among other things, the idea for Post-it notes. — location: [2178](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=2178) ^ref-17657 chapter culture and 20% --- Especially on a topic like September 11, with so many differing opinions, I decided this was a problem worth solving.” For the next few months, Bharat worked on solving the problems he had seen so vividly on September 11. There — location: [2220](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=2220) ^ref-52958 Google news was born out of 9/11 --- StoryRank, a first cousin of the PageRank formula used to prioritize Google search results. But it was not sufficient, he realized, to show headlines alone, so with the help of others he built a search function specifically for the online news he was collecting. There would always be much more news than could be shown on any homepage, but a search for the news would let the user decide, in a Google-like way, what subjects to highlight. Two other Googlers worked with Bharat to build a working demo, which was released within the company to gauge reaction from others. He knew he was on to something big in December 2001, when then CEO Eric Schmidt dropped in to chat about Google News. — location: [2234](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=2234) ^ref-59760 build on your strength and need and 20% --- Google News caught on with computer users and journalists alike, leading to new innovations such as Google Alerts, an automatic way for people to track specific topics of interest by email. — location: [2258](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=2258) ^ref-23140 --- Nevill-Manning studied various online retailers closely, including Amazon.com, looking at how they extracted information based on category, price, and description. After about six months, he turned his idea into a prototype. On a lark, he named the computer file where he stored the code for his new creation “Froogle,” since it rhymed with Google and conveyed the hunt for value that consumed consumers. Internally, the official code name for the initiative was “Product Search.” In early 2002 he took his prototype to Larry, Sergey, and Eric to get their reaction. They liked the idea, but weren’t sure whether it was worth further exploration. One lingering question was whether Froogle could become part of Google’s core search — location: [2277](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B000FCKIXW&location=2277) ^ref-61374 google shopping ---