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Even Google.com wants to make Money !!!
dhanu1000
Date:
December 18, 2003 @ 1:39 PM
-Dhananjay Rokde
The world's biggest, best-loved search engine
owes its success to supreme technology and a
simple rule: Don't be evil. Now the geek icon is
finding that moral compromise is just the cost of
doing big business.
Life used to be so much easier for Sergey Brin.
In the autumn of 1998, he and Larry Page
unleashed Google with a clear mission: Help
computer users find exactly what they want on the
Internet. Newbies flocked to the site, grateful
for a simple search engine that was both powerful
and intuitive. More sophisticated techies came to
appreciate Google's computational elegance and
its willingness to shun the "portal" model that
crammed ecommerce down their throats. Within
months, Google became one of the most popular
sites on the Web - and not long after that,
"Google" became a verb. Today, Internet users
spend about 15 million hours a month on the site.
Google.com logs more than 28 million visitors
each month, nearly as many as Yahoo! and MSN.
Nearly four out of five Internet searches happen
on Google or on sites that license its technology.
Google owes its swelling popularity to deft
algorithms that quickly divine what's useful on
the Web. But there's more to it than that. At
Google, purity matters. Over the years, Brin and
Page have resisted pressure to run banners,
opting instead for haiku-like text ads and
unintrusive sponsored links. They've taken a
stand against pop-ups and pop-unders and refused
ads from sites they consider to be overly
negative. All the while, they've stubbornly kept
the Google homepage concise and pristine. On just
a faint whisper of a marketing campaign, the
company pulled in an estimated $70 million last
year (a third from licensing fees and the rest
from ads).
The Google strategy appeals to every engineer's
sense of The Way It Should Be. Build the best
entry in the science fair. Do not tart it up. Do
not make it more clever than it needs to be.
But a funny thing is happening on the way to
Internet adulthood - Google's awkward teen years.
The company's growth spurt has spawned a host of
daunting questions that no data-retrieval system
can easily answer. Should Google play ball with
repressive foreign governments? Refuse to link
users to "hate" sites? Punish marketers who
artificially inflate site rankings? Fight the
Church of Scientology's attempts to silence
critics? And what to do about the cache, Google's
archive of previously indexed pages? In April,
the German national railroad threatened legal
action to remove an obsolete site containing
sabotage instructions.
Most major companies refer to a detailed code of
corporate conduct when considering such policy
decisions. General Electric devotes 15 pages on
its Web site to an integrity policy. Nortel's
site has 34 pages of guidelines. Google's code of
conduct can be boiled down to a mere three words:
Don't be evil.
Very Star Wars. But what does it mean?
"Evil," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what
Sergey says is evil."
Of the Google triumvirate, Schmidt makes sure the
company stays on course financially and
strategically; Page keeps busy in the R&D lab,
cranking out new features; and the 29-year-old
Brin, in his role as Google's conscience and head
policymaker, spends his days gripping the moral
tiller - and in so doing, imposes his worldview
on everyone else.
That puts Brin at the flashpoint of most of the
major Internet-related controversies. He knows
his decisions have far-reaching consequences. He
feels the pressure that attends Google's growing
power. "I do get fairly stressed," Brin says.
"I'd like to feel a little less scrutinized."
Google has succeeded by adhering to one, pure
principle: Do good by users. Now, for the first
time in its history, Google is facing rifts
between what's good for users and what's good for
Google. And Sergey Brin is finding that purity
just doesn't scale.
II.
Don't be evil. Brin has had to refer back to
those three words quite a bit over the past year.
Governments, religious bodies, businesses, and
individuals are all bearing down on the company,
forcing Brin to make decisions that have an
effect on the entire Internet. "Things that would
normally be side issues for another company carry
the weight of responsibility for us," Brin says.
In March, lawyers representing the Church of
Scientology requested that Google stop linking to
a Norwegian anti-Scientology site called
Operation Clambake. The church claimed the site,
xenu.net, displayed copyrighted Scientology
content and that by providing links to the
information, Google was in violation of the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Much to the
dismay of many First Amendment fans, Google
caved, removing the offending pages from its
index.
In May, Anita Roddick, the outspoken British
founder of the Body Shop, blasted Google in her
blog for yanking a text ad for her site. Google's
explanation: Roddick had called actor John
Malkovich a "vomitous worm" in her blog,
violating a Google policy against accepting ads
for sites that are "anti-" anything. After
Roddick protested, Google offered to reinstate
the ad in exchange for a promise from Roddick
that she would remove the Malkovich reference
from the first page of her site. When she
refused, Brin had a decision to make: Should he
give in and accept Roddick's money, or stand by
his principles? He chose his principles.
Three months later, Daniel Brandt, who runs
google-watch.org, attacked PageRank, the
algorithm at the heart of Google's vaunted
system, accusing the company of being unfair and
undemocratic. Brandt urged the FTC to investigate
Google and regulate it as a public utility - as a
company that, in effect, controls access to the
Internet's natural resources. The mainstream
press tended to dismiss Brandt as a webmaster
spurned by a low Google ranking, but in the
online forums and weblogs, many agreed with his
assertion. As far as search engines go, Google
has become the only game in town.
Then in the first week of September, Brin found
himself pulled into matters of foreign policy. He
received several emails from users telling him
that the Chinese government, worried about
political dissent in the weeks before the 16th
Chinese Party Congress, had shut down access to
the site. "Our Chinese traffic was down by a
factor of five," Brin says. "We were blocked."
Brin was no expert on international diplomacy. So
he ordered a half-dozen books about Chinese
history, business, and politics on Amazon.com and
splurged on overnight shipping. He consulted with
Schmidt, Page, and David Drummond, Google's
general counsel and head of business development,
then put in a call to tech industry doyenne
Esther Dyson for advice and contacts. Google has
no offices in China, so Brin enlisted go-betweens
to get the message to Chinese authorities that
Google would be very interested in working out a
compromise to restore access. "We didn't want to
do anything rash," Brin says. "The situation over
there is more complex than I had imagined."
Four days later, Chinese authorities restored
access to the site. How did that happen? For
starters, the Chinese government was deluged with
outcries from the nation's 46 million Internet
users when access to Google was cut off.
"Internet users in China are an apolitical
crowd," says Xiao Qiang, executive director of
New York-based Human Rights In China. "They tend
to be people who are doing well, and they don't
usually voice strong views. But this stepped into
their digital freedom."
The quick workaround: Chinese authorities tweaked
the national firewall, making the new Google
China different from the site that was turned
off. Today, Chinese who use Google to search on
terms like "falun gong" or "human rights in
china" receive a standard-looking results page.
But when they click on any of the results, either
their browsers are redirected to a blank or
government-approved page, or their computers are
blocked from accessing Google for an hour or two.
"They have a new mechanism that can block the
results of certain searches," Brin says. Did
Google help China find or obtain the filtering
technology? "We didn't make changes to our
servers" is all he'll say.
In late October, a report by two Harvard
researchers revealed that Google had begun
filtering its own servers to block users in
Germany, France, and Switzerland from accessing
sites carrying material likely to be judged
racist or inflammatory in each country. Neither
Brin nor anyone else at Google will talk about
about the preemptive self-censoring moves in
Europe.
In the wake of these international incidents,
members of Google's loyal, tech-savvy
constituency began to question the company's
motives. "I am a little on the fence about
Google's latest actions," wrote Brian Osborne, a
staff writer for Geek.com, a news site. "On one
hand, I understand Google's stance that it must
remain in compliance with German and French laws.
Nevertheless, Google is putting itself on a very
slippery slope."
III.
"What is this?" asks a visitor squinting at the
form he must sign before proceeding to the
cafeteria at Google's Mountain View, California,
headquarters. "An NDA? To have lunch?"
The receptionist shrugs. "This is Google," she
says. "They're crazy that way."
The Googleplex, contrary to almost every written
account of the place, is hardly a haven of
easygoing geek whimsy. The cafeteria is adorned
with a tie-dyed banner, but the Google employees
aren't humming any Dead songs. Most of them
appear deadly serious. Brin's second-floor office
overlooks a courtyard festooned with empty
hammocks. A book about Enron rests on his coffee
table.
Brin's designation as Google's policy maven is
relatively new. He, the big thinker, and Page,
the mad scientist, complemented each other and
shared nearly every role in Google's early years.
"Larry was always the driver," says Scott Hassan,
who did much of the programming for the original
Google. "A big part of his role was going around
and yelling 'Why can't it do this? Why isn't this
working?'" Brin would sit next to Hassan and
watch him write code, pointing out errors and
taking an occasional turn at the keyboard.
The frenetic Page looked at all the popular
engines at the time and decided they were going
about search the wrong way. By relying on HTML
code - meta tags as well as page text - they
would bring back all sorts of irrelevant
information and open themselves up to massive
manipulation by webmasters looking to increase
their own rankings. Brin took Page's observation
and ran with it. He figured the best way around
the problem was to harness the vast repository of
human judgments already preserved on the Internet
in the form of hyperlinks. "Most people search
for local maximums - like figuring out how to get
the best car, the best immediate situation,"
Hassan says. "Sergey is always searching for
global maximums."
By 2001, Google's breakneck growth convinced Page
and Brin it was time to establish a more rigid
structure. Page handed over the CEO title to
Schmidt and became copresident with Brin. The
move freed up Page to focus on developing his
knack for product development (as a child, he
crafted a printer out of spare parts and Lego
blocks). Brin's passion for the big picture made
him the natural choice to spend time on Google's
growing role in the world.
Which means Brin's views on politics and policy
matter quite a bit. Not that he's willing to
talk. He tells me he listens to NPR on his
morning drive to work. I think Democrat and ask
about his voter affiliation. He says he votes
across party lines. Independent? He smiles and
tells me there's no easy shortcut toward figuring
out how he comes to his decisions about good and
evil. And even if there was, he wouldn't let me
in on it. If I succeed in figuring out exactly
what he considers good and evil, people who don't
care about Google users might start gaming him
the way they try to game his search engine.
Born in Moscow and raised in the suburbs of
Washington, DC, Brin grew up listening in on
conversations at the dinner parties thrown by his
father, a math professor, and his mother, a NASA
scientist. Talking about his decisions and the
values he holds most dear, Brin chooses his
language carefully, but one word he repeatedly
comes back to is "useful." And while Google's
policy decisions over the past year look a bit
haphazard at first glance, they begin to make
more sense in a worldview where usefulness is the
paramount virtue.
Aside from the indisputable goodness of causing
hard-line Communist Party officials to say the
word "Google" to one another for a few days, it's
difficult to say on which side of the good-evil
line the company's China resolution falls. Brin
seems at peace with how it all turned out.
"Political searches are not that big a fraction
of the searches coming out of China," he says.
"You want to look at the total value picture that
a search engine like Google brings and think of
all that it's used for."
But Xiao Qiang, the activist, thinks the company
should have taken a firmer stand. "Ultimately,
China's state censorship mechanism will have to
submit to this growing demand for freedom from
Chinese netizens," Xiao says. "It's important to
protect integrity, particularly for an Internet
firm."
On the same day that China blocked access to
Google, it also flipped the switch on AltaVista.
AltaVista issued a defiant statement to the media
and went on to list several ways to access the
site. Months later, AltaVista is still blocked.
Brin figures that by meeting China halfway,
Google remained available - and useful - to
visitors and also preserved its advertising
revenue there. "You have to look at the total
value picture," he says.
What about the Scientology mess? Didn't Google
give in too easily? Jennifer Urban, a fellow at
Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law and a member
of Chilling Effects, an organization formed to
document attempts to stifle speech on the
Internet, says that from a legal standpoint,
Google's hands were tied. "To qualify for safe
harbor protection from liability, they really
have to err on the side of taking down the link,"
Urban says.
In fact, Google didn't fold entirely. After
consulting with Brin, Kulpreet Rana, Google's
head of IP, found a way that Google could comply
with the law without letting the Scientologists
erase their critics from the Internet. The
solution: When Google gets a request to remove a
link under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA
Section 512, it substitutes a link to a form on
the Chilling Effects' site. The form contains the
Web address of the page in question, and anyone
still interested in the site can direct their
browser to the address.
Does abiding by the letter of a bad and flimsy
law absolve Google from charges that it squashed
free expression? Cindy Cohn, legal director of
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is certain
that a vigorous legal challenge would put an end
to the steady flow of Section 512 filings Google
receives but admits she doesn't expect Google to
devote its resources to such a broad fight. And
while some cheered Google's workaround as
evidence of a rebellious bit of payback - a small
point scored against the enemies of unfettered
speech - the move is another instance of Brin
choosing the path of usefulness over a righteous
crusade.
IV.
If Brin's code of good and evil permits the
company to negotiate with sovereign governments
and allows for some legal meddling from unpopular
religions, there is no wiggle room - no gray area
whatsoever - when it comes to those who attempt
to subvert the power of Google to their own
commercial ends. One thing Brin is sure of: On
the side of evil lies trickery.
I ask Brin to imagine, for a moment, running his
company's evil twin, a sort of anti-Google. "We
would be doing things like having advertising
that wasn't marked as being paid for. Stuff that
violates the trust of the users," he says,
describing a site that sounds not unlike the
pay-for-placement search site Overture. "Say
someone came looking for breast cancer
information and didn't know that some listings
were paid for with money from drug companies.
We'd be endangering people's health."
The anti-Google might also be more amenable to
the growing business of "optimization," the
altering of Web sites so that they rank higher in
search engine results. For a fee, there's help
for a Dallas plumber who's unhappy that his site
is on the 17th page of results when someone types
"Dallas plumber" into Google. An optimizer will
tweak the site in such a way that boosts it to,
say, the 3rd page of results.
To pull this off with Google, an optimizer needs
to understand how the company's search mechanism
works. Google uses 100 or so closely guarded
algorithms to determine its search results. The
best known of the lot is called PageRank, which
allocates relevancy to a page according to the
number and importance of pages linked to it, the
number and importance of pages linked to each of
those pages, and so on. One ploy is to create
"link farms," in which an optimizer gets clients
to link to one another, racking up relevancy
points. In general, optimizers make a living by
guessing what Google regards as important. The
way Brin sees it, the optimizers are co-opting
Google's bond of trust with its users. He regards
optimizers the way a mother grizzly might regard
a hunter jabbing at her cub with a stick.
Every month, when Google updates its index and
its mix of algorithms, it rakes a disruptive claw
across the optimizers' systems. In the industry,
the monthly shuffle is known as the Google Dance,
and Brin doesn't mind letting on that if Google
ends up dancing all over the optimizers, so much
the better. "When we change and improve our
technology, things get shuffled around," Brin
says, "and sometimes it has a disproportionate
effect on optimization sites."
Consider the case of Bob Massa, a former solid
oak dining room furniture salesman who lives in
Oklahoma City and runs SearchKing, an
optimization company he started in 1997. Last
summer, Massa received a rare gift from Google in
the form of the Google Toolbar, a software
program that lets users perform searches without
going to Google.com. More important for Massa,
the Toolbar shows the approximate PageRank, on a
scale of one to ten, of whatever page a user is
visiting. It was the first time since Brin and
Page were in grad school that they'd shared so
much technical information. After years of
watching Google's every move like an Etruscan
high priest trying to augur divine intent from
cloud formations, Massa had a piece of the goods.
On August 9, Massa started selling optimization
based on PageRank.
After the Google Dance of September 20, most of
Massa's customers suddenly found themselves in a
heap at the very bottom of Google's 3 billion
site index. It seems that the improvements Google
had made included a severe downgrade of sites
with links to SearchKing. Massa's customers,
needless to say, were very, very unhappy.
"Everyone thinks I'm the biggest idiot in the
world for making Google mad," Massa said in
October.
He filed suit a few weeks later, charging that
Google downgraded his customers' scores in a
deliberate attempt to put him out of business.
The suit asks for an injunction forcing Google to
restore the scores to pre-Dance levels, and seeks
$75,000 in damages. "It's a classic good versus
evil thing," says Massa, turning Brin's framework
back on Google itself. "I knew they wouldn't like
it. I didn't think they'd go so far as to wipe
out all these little people."
The day Massa's suit was filed, the reaction from
the Slashdot crowd and most other forums was
predictably vociferous, with posters stumbling
over themselves to craft metaphors painting Massa
as a criminal suing his victim. But gradually, a
surprising number of people, while careful not to
look as though they were defending Massa, began
tagging the search engine as a Google-opoly. It's
hard to sympathize with a David as parasitic as
Massa, but Slashdotters tend to be uneasy with
Goliaths of any stripe, especially when their
methods are kept secret.
And the real problem with Massa is that he's
simply the termite Brin is able to see. There are
thousands more behind the wall, invisibly boring
away at the very structure of Google's house.
"It's easy to become overly obsessed with those
kinds of things," Brin admits.
It would make things a lot easier for Brin if the
world's webmasters would just act as though his
site didn't matter, but that's not human nature.
There's no way around it - as long as Google
remains the search engine of choice, the arms
race between Google coders and the hordes of
optimizers will go on.
V.
As proficient as Google is at revealing
information, Brin is adept at keeping key morsels
under wraps. In a way, that makes a lot of sense.
Although the obvious image of Google is one of
accumulation, the essence of data retrieval is
just the opposite. Google is about division and
subtraction, narrowing down billions of choices
before revealing the most promising. Brin's world
isn't as simple as visible equals good, hidden
equals evil. Google's effectiveness as a search
tool depends largely on how well it's able to
shroud the site's inner workings from the
commercial interests that clutter so much of the
Internet today.
But here's the thing: If Brin thinks his job has
become more difficult over the past year, it may
soon become near impossible. In September, at the
height of the China controversy, Google legal
eagle Drummond spotted an article about the
prospect of a Google IPO, which, the story said,
might be the spark to ignite the dormant public
offerings market. Drummond forwarded the story
with some sardonic comments. In his office, Brin
tries to find the email for me but can't. He
notes the irony in that, and goes on to
paraphrase the note: "Oh, OK, now we're going to
reform the Chinese government - and on top of
that, we're going to fix Wall Street."
Schmidt claims the company is in no rush to go
public, but his appointment and the hiring of CFO
George Rayes last August were unmistakable steps
in that direction. When the IPO comes, it will
bring riches - and more problems.
As a private company, Google has one master:
users. As a public company, there are
shareholders to worry about. And more than happy
users, shareholders want ever-greater profits.
Thus far, Brin and Page have succeeded in
standing up to pressures that might compromise
Google and the user experience. Google's
influential stand against pop-up ads extends
beyond its own domain - the company rejects
advertisers whose links take Google users to
pages that feature pop-ups. (AOL followed suit in
October, announcing its own pop-up moratorium.)
But when Google becomes a public company,
shareholders might force the site to take a more
amenable position, if the price is right. After
all, for several years, Yahoo! refused to accept
anything but fast-loading banner ads, claiming
that it was looking out for users. That policy
lasted until right about the time that the
company's stock price began to cave.
Such pressure could cause Brin to rethink other
policies, like his decision to refuse all alcohol
and tobacco advertising. The fact that Google
accepts advertising for adult content sites is an
intriguing commentary on Brin's morality:
Cigarettes and booze are evil; porn is not. It's
a policy that would become progressively harder
to defend were Google to go public. Then there's
the Google cache to consider. Today's users love
having access to a warehouse of information that
was once published on the Internet but has since
disappeared. Some information goes away for a
reason, though. The cache could get Google in
trouble, and Brin & Co. could soon find
themselves facing all sorts of libel, defamation,
or copyright lawsuits.
Increased competition may also cause Brin to do
other things he's loath to do. So far, Google has
gotten by without much in the way of competition
from the other Internet superpowers. But in May,
Yusuf Mehdi, the head of MSN, said he views
Google as "more of a competitor than a partner"
in the effort to become the default homepage on
millions of browsers. What if, as Google.com
solidifies its position as the focal point of the
Internet, Yahoo! and AOL begin to rethink the
millions in licensing fees they pay to what has
become a top competitor? Brin may be forced to
make the kind of concessions that he's thus far
reserved for international governments.
The utilitarian manner in which Google has
achieved its success has made it a sentimental
favorite among the code-parsing set.
Tech-community sites like Slashdot are almost
uniformly pro-Google. Those with the temerity to
bring lawsuits against Google ultimately feel the
burn of online flames, watching their servers
wither under the quasi-zealous wrath of thousands
of engineers defending one of their own. But as
Google is forced to make more concessions to
realpolitik, its bonds with that idealistic
constituency will inevitably continue to fray.
And without any sort of technological lock-in, it
would be very easy for Google's visitors to
simply start using other search engines. Fast
Search & Transfer, based in Norway, boasts a 2.1
billion-page index at www.alltheweb.com, and its
search engine works as quickly as Google's.
What's more, it does a complete crawl of the
Internet every 7 to 11 days compared with
Google's 28 days. What if an influential group of
politically active netizens makes a rousing case
for boycotting Google on the grounds that it is
anti-free speech and in cahoots with repressive
governments? How long can a hugely powerful
company that plays its decisions so close to the
vest and refuses to justify itself publicly count
on the devotion of the average information-hungry
Web user?
It's inevitable that a company of Google's size
and influence will have to compromise on purity.
There's a chance that, in five years, Google will
end up looking like a slightly cleaner version of
what Yahoo! has become. There's also a chance
that the site will be able to make a convincing
case to investors that long-term user
satisfaction trumps short-term profit. The
leadership of the Internet is Sergey Brin's to
lose. For now, at least, in Google we trust.
-Dhananjay Rokde
RasMasta
Date:
December 29, 2003 @ 8:02 PM
Wow....$70 million last year alone...wow
dhanu1000
Date:
December 29, 2003 @ 11:39 PM
Thats' just last year ... Google has been up &
around for at least 12 years; and selling ads
since 6 years.
irUgly
Date:
January 5, 2004 @ 3:18 PM
I feel a kinship with Google. I hope they do what
makes them happy.
invocati
Date:
January 5, 2004 @ 4:35 PM
Sorry too long to read.
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