In The Plex

by Steve Levy

  10 “Eviscerates privacy protections” Marc Rotenberg, CEO, Electronic Privacy Information Center.

  10 “Concealment and misdirection” Gary Reback, representing the Open Book Alliance.

  10 “Price fixing” Lynn Chu, Writers’ Representatives literary agency.

  11 “the first kid” “Interview with Larry Page,” Academy of Achievement, October 28, 2000. Located on website ttp://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/pag0int-1.

  12 summer program in leadership Page describing attending the Leadershape program in his May 2, 2009, commencement speech at the University of Michigan.

  12 subject would stand Page Author’s interview with Megan Smith.

  13 “I thought he was pretty obnoxious” John Battelle, The Search (New York: Portfolio, 2009), p. 68.

  13 LarryAndSergey The Google Story, David Vise and Mark Malseed (New York: Delacorte, 2005), p. 33.

  14 advanced swimming Brenna McBride, “The Ultimate Search,” University of Maryland Alumni Magazine, Spring 2000. Michael Brin also talked about his son in Tom Howell, “Raising an Internet Giant,” University of Maryland Diamondback; and Adam Tanner, “Google Co-founder Lives Modestly, Émigré Dad Says,” USA Today, April 6, 2004; and Mark Malseed, “The Story of Sergey Brin,” Moment, February 2007. Malseed expanded on his research in The Google Story.

  15 “Suppose all the information” Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web (New York: HarperBusiness, 2000), p. 4.

  15 The web’s pedigree I give a detailed account of the work of Bush, Englebart, and Atkinson in Insanely Great: The Story of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything (New York: Penguin, 1994), and discuss Nelson’s work in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1984).

  16 personalized movie ratings Sergey Brin, résumé at http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/.

  17 “Why don’t we use the links” Page and Brin spoke to me in 2002 about developing the early search engine, a subject we also discussed in conversations in 1999, 2001, and 2004.

  17 “The early versions of hypertext” Battelle, The Search, p. 72.

  20 “For thirty years” Carolyn Crouch et al., “In Memoriam: Gerald Salton, March 8, 1927–August 28, 1995,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 47(2), 108; “Salton Dies; Was Leader in Information Retrieval Field,” Computing Research Association website.

  20 the web was winning I looked at the state of web search in “Search for Tomorrow,” Newsweek, October 28, 1996.

  21 “The idea behind PageRank” John Ince, “The Lost Google Tapes,” a series of interviews with Google. In January 2000, Ince taped a number of Google sources, including Brin, Page, Dave Cheriton, and venture capitalist Mike Moritz for an article in Upside and later made the recordings available on www.podtech.net.

  21 “It’s all recursive” Page’s remark came in a panel discussion, “Navigating Cyberspace,” at the 2001 PC Forum, held in Scottsdale, Arizona. Also on the panel was Eric Schmidt, then the CEO of Novell.

  22 the words “Bill Clinton” The example is explained in Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertexual Web Search Engine,” Computer Networks and ISDN Systems Archive, April 1998.

  27 “The unfair advantage” Ince, “The Lost Google Tapes.”

  28 faculty members couldn’t get tenure Page cited the joke in “Inspiring Interview with Larry Page, Founder of Google,” an unsigned interview posted on the Inspire Minds blog, January 18, 2009. He specified, however, that while the professors are “very focused on what is going on in the world,” they also do research.

  28 Granite Systems “Cisco Buys Granite Systems,” CNET, September 3, 1996.

  29 Larry Page laid out Hassan read the email to me.

  30 “We weren’t …” Ince, “The Lost Google Tapes.”

  30 “wetbox” Ibid.

  33 “Money shouldn’t be a problem” Ibid.

  44 “The unit of thinking” David J. Brown, “A Conversation with Wayne Rosing,” ACMQueue, October 2, 2003.

  44 Google File System Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, and Shun-Tak Leung, “The Google File System,” 19th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Lake George, New York: 2003.

  44 Timothy Koogle Linda Himmelstein, “Tim Koogle: The Grown-up Voice of Reason at Yahoo,” BusinessWeek, September 7, 1998.

  45 “always on time” This description of BART came from Google engineer Matt Cutts.

  47 Cyc Clive Thompson, “The Know-It-All Machine,” Lingua Franca, September 2001.

  51 “mike siwek” I wrote about Singhal and the Mike Siwek query in “How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web,” Wired, March 2010.

  56 WebGuerrilla Stefanie Olsen, “Does Search Engine’s Power Threaten Web’s Independence?” CNET, October 31, 2002.

  56 SearchKing Farhad Manjoo, “The Google Backlash,” Salon, June 23, 2003.

  59 David Gelernter Mirror Worlds or: The Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox … How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). The Gelernter quotes were drawn from my interviews with him during research for a Sunday New York Times Magazine article, “The Unabomber and David Gelernter, May 21, 1995.”

  60 garden gnome sculpture The Googler quoted is Greg Badros, an engineering manager who worked in Mountain View from 2003 to 2009, when he left the company for Facebook.

  61 “We want to run” The search quality manager quoted is Patrick Riley.

  62 “When I look” Quoted in Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 1995), p. 922. This is the book that Larry Page read at Stanford, cowritten by the professor he hired to head research at Google.

  63 “The sliced raw fish” Miguel Helft, “Google’s Computing Power Refines Translation Tool,” The New York Times, March 8, 2010.

  65 “Seti” Simon Tong, “Lessons Learned Developing a Practical Large Scale Machine Learning System,” Official Google Research Blog, April 6, 2010.

  Part Two: Googlenomics

  71 “is among the few schools” Statement of Salar Kamanger, “PSA Elections 1997,” Stanford University website, March 6, 1997.

  73 The head was John Doerr There is excellent background on Kleiner Perkins and VC culture in David A. Kaplan, The Silicon Boys and Their Valley of Dreams (New York: William Morrow, 1999).

  74 “zero percent possibility” Ince, “The Lost Google Tapes.”

  75 Google’s first press release “Google Receives $25 Million in Equity Funding,” Google Press Center website, June 7, 1999.

  77 “true story testimonials” “Google True Story Testimonials,” 2000–2001, Google Press Release.

  80 “He was the only” John Markoff and G. Pascal Zachary, “In Searching the Web, Google Finds Riches,” The New York Times, April 13, 2003.

  82 “Basically, we needed” Kevin Gray, “The Little Engine That Could,” Details, February 2002.

  85 “long tail” The definitive article on this phenomenon is Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” Wired, October 2004. Anderson (who is my editor at Wired) later wrote a best-selling book with the same title.

  85 Yossi Vardi “Interview with Sergey Brin,” Haaretz.com, June 2, 2008.

  90 So Veach devised I described the workings of Google’s ad model in “Secret of Googlenomics,” Wired, April 2009.

  94 “That’s really satisfying” Brin told me this while I was researching “The World According to Google,” Newsweek, December 16, 2002.

  95 Overture’s failures Flake presented his slide show, “How Google Won the Search Engine Wars,” at the Marketing 3.0 conference in New York City, April 25, 2009.

  99 “the dominant transaction mechanism” Benjamin Edelman, Michael Ostrovsky, and Michael Schwarz, “Internet Advertising and the Generalized Second Price Auction: Selling Billions of Dollars Worth of Keywords,” American Economic Review, March 2007.

  101 “many synergies” Amy Harmon, “Google Deal Ties Company to Weblogs,” The Ne
w York Times, February 17, 2003.

  102 “The potential exists” Danny Sullivan, “Google Throws Hat into the Contextual Advertising Ring,” Search Engine Watch, March 4, 2003.

  102 “We could change the economics” Wojcicki called me at Newsweek in 2003 to explain the product.

  105 In 2008, a story Nicholas Carlson, “Google’s Worst Ads, Ever,” Business Insider, August 20, 2009.

  106 In May 2010 Neal Mohan, “The AdSense Revenue Share,” Google Inside AdSense blog, May 24, 1010.

  Part Three: Don’t Be Evil

  121 crazy-like-a-fox During the conversation Mayer insisted, “We definitely have a grand plan”; “Living by Google Rules,” Newsweek, April 25, 2005.

  123 “We wanted to place” Eugenia Brin, “Genia Brin’s Immigration,” posted on March 9, 2009, to the myStory blog on the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society website.

  123 Brin sent employees Marissa Mayer provided the Brin option-price story.

  124 “Discipline must come” Maria Montessori and Anne E. George, The Montessori Method (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1912), p. 86. Obtained through a book scanned from the Stanford Library via Google Book Search.

  131 “This campus epitomizes virtual reality” www.topgradeconstruction.com/our-work/commercial-industrial-1.html.

  132 $319 million Katherine Conrad, “Google to Purchase Mountain View Buildings,” San Jose Mercury News, June 15, 2008.

  132 Permanente Creek Steve Gilford, “Search for the Source of the Permanente,” The Permanente Journal, Summer 1998.

  132 zip line Vincent Mo, “Traveling by Zipline,” Official Google Blog, October 27, 2008.

  134 “We’re here to educate” Chuck Salter, “Josef Desimone,” Fast Company, February 19, 2006.

  134 Google’s masseuse Bonnie Brown, Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google (Nashville: Verum Libri, 2007).

  135 “It’s sort of like” Kim Malone, “Virtual Love,” unpublished. Malone’s entertaining novel blends a fictional romance story with her lightly fictionalized account of life at Google. Malone married after writing the book and now uses the name Kim Malone Scott.

  136 He woke up Tim Bray, “Life at Google,” Ongoing blog, April 12, 2010.

  136 a T. rex fossil Joshua Green, “Google’s Tar Pit,” The Atlantic, December 2007, reported that “Stan,” which appeared without explanation on the campus not long after the company moved into the old Silicon Graphics HQ, was a replica of his namesake, discovered in South Dakota. But the Black Hills Institute, which displays the original Stan, disagreed, saying that Google was unwilling to pay for a replica. (Bill Harlan, “South Dakota T. rex Draws Media Attention,” Rapid City Journal, November 15, 2007.)

  138 “Lake Wobegon” Peter Norvig, “Hiring: The Lake Wobegon Strategy,” Google Research Blog, March 11, 2006.

  139 “the Googliness screen” The term came from Megan Smith, who headed business development at Google.

  143 It was Bill Campbell’s Background on Campbell can be found in Lenny T. Mendoca and Kevin D. Sneader, “Coaching Innovation: An interview with Intuit’s Bill Campbell,” The McKinsey Quarterly, 2007; Jennifer Reingold, “The Secret Coach,” Fortune, July 31, 2008; and Ken Auletta, Googled (New York: Penguin, 2009), pp. 76–78.

  145 Schmidt revealed Josh McHugh, “Google vs. Evil,” Wired, November 2001.

  146 IPO Of the many articles on the IPO, ones I found particularly helpful include Kevin J. Delaney and Robin Sidel, “How Miscalculations and Hubris Hobbled Celebrated Google IPO,” The Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2004, and John Heilemann, “Journey to the (Revolutionary, Evil-Hating, Cash-Crazy and Possibly Self-Destructive) Center of Google,” GQ, March 2005. One anonymous follower even created a “Google IPO Central” website (www.google-ipo.com) posting articles from various sources as they were published.

  146 “I think there’s always” I visited Google pre-IPO for my story “All Eyes on Google,” Newsweek, March 29, 2004.

  148 “from a little old lady” Eric Schmidt, “How I Did It: Google’s CEO on the Enduring Lessons of a Quirky IPO,” Harvard Business Review, May 2010.

  151 2.7 million shares Stephanie Olsen, “Google, Yahoo bury the legal hatchet,” CNET News, August 9, 2004.

  151 On the video Mike Landberg, “Investors Get Few Details from Google’s Somber Video,” San Jose Mercury News, July 31, 2004.

  153 “Only those who were” Scott Reeves, “Gagging on Google’s IPO,” Forbes.com, August 6, 2004.

  154 “It has no bearing” Kevin Delaney, Gregory Zuckerman, and Robin Sidel, “Google Interview May Set Back IPO; Auction Starts Today,” The Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2004.

  156 “daily stock price movements” Bo Cowgill with Eric Zitewitz, “Mood Swings at Work: Stock Price Movements, Effort and Decision Making,” work in progress, abstract published at Cowgill’s website, http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/bo_cowgill/research.htm.

  157 de la Renta Sally Singer, “Machine Dreams,” Vogue, August 2009.

  157 “While one was looking” Brown, Giigle, p. 190.

  157 pleasure boat Kieran Nash, “Google billionaire buys Kiwi’s superyacht,” New Zealand Herald, January 9, 2011.

  162 “obtrusive in no particular” William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 133.

  163 OKR The Grove origin of objectives and key results was described in Tim Jackson, Inside Intel (New York: Plume, 1998), p. 111.

  164 MOMA Gary Hamel, The Future of Management (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007), reports that MOMA stands for Message Oriented Middleware Application, which sounds suspiciously un-Googley. Hamel’s book is a good primer on Google management.

  164 Mark Jen Evan Hansen, “Google Blogger Has Left the Building,” CNET News, February 8, 2005.

  166 But Maria Montessori Montessori, The Montessori Method, p. 86.

  Part Four: Google’s Cloud

  167 Paul Buchheit Besides interviews with Buchheit and others involved in Gmail, I drew on Jessica Livingston’s extensive interview in Founders at Work: Stories of Start-Ups’ Early Days (Berkeley, Calif.: Apress, 2007); Rejesh Barnabas, “The Good Guy Behind ‘Don’t Be Evil’ and Google Mail,” Newsvine, February 29, 2009; and the accounts in Planet Google and Googled.

  174 Valleywag Owen Thomas, “Susan Wojcicki’s Big Lie,” Valleywag, July 5, 2004.

  175 Schmidt was so furious Randall Stross, “Google Anything, So Long as It’s Not Google,” The New York Times, August 28, 2005.

  175 “My personal view” Interview with author, October 2004.

  175 Nicole Wong Background on Google’s privacy team of Wong and McLaughlin can be found in Jeffrey Rosen, “Google’s Gatekeepers,” The New York Times Magazine, November 30, 2008.

  176 “Why Gmail Gives Me the Creeps” Charles Cooper, CNET, April 2, 2004.

  176 “Google looks at privacy” “PI Files Complaints in Sixteen Countries Against Google Mail,” Privacy International press release, April 19, 2003.

  176 Brin got on the phone Matthew Honan, “Don’t Be Afraid of the Big Bad Gmail,” Salon, April 26, 2004.

  178 One bone of contention Terry Winograd, one of Larry Page’s professors at Stanford, spent part of a sabbatical at Google and worked on the Gmail team. He later attributed the initial omission of a delete button to Page, but Buchheit says that it was his idea, supported by Page.

  178 Eric Schmidt had long before Schmidt revealed his views on this at a deposition in the Viacom lawsuit.

  179 Bill Gates visited me Gates visited Newsweek on October 20, 2004, and we met in my editor George Hackett’s office.

  181 Google’s own cloud Though information about Google’s data centers has been one of the most closely held secrets, current and former Googlers such as Jim Reese, Urs Hölzle, Luiz Barroso, Erik Teetzel, Bill Weihl, Cathy Gordon, and Chris Sacca were able to speak of them on the record. There have also been presentations at conferences by Googlers captured on video. In addition, helpful accounts include Stross, Planet Go
ogle; David F. Carr, “How Google Works,” Baseline, June 7, 2006; Rich Miller, “The Google Data Center FAQ,” Data Center Knowledge, August 26, 2008; and Nicolas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google (New York: Norton, 2008).

  182 “You’re paying for security” Ince, “The Lost Google Notes.”

  183 Google’s first CIO Quoted in Carr, “How Google Works.”

  185 Page’s Law Brin made his comments during the 2009 Google I/O event. Quoted in Danny Sullivan, “Sergey Brin on Newspapers, Breaking ‘Page’s Law,’ and Bing as Name of Microsoft’s New Search Engine,” Search Engine Land, May 27, 2009.