Growing Up Google.

• Author: Carr, Nicholas
• Position: 'I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59' - Book review

Douglas Edwards, I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 432 pp., $27.00.

In December 2001, an upstart Silicon Valley company named Google posted its corporate philosophy, in the form of a list of "Ten Things We've Found to be True," on its website. At once charmingly idealistic and off-puttingly smug, the list set the tone for Google's future public pronouncements. "You can be serious without a suit," read one of the tenets. "You can make money without doing evil," read another. But it was the most innocuous sounding of the ten principles--"It's best to do one thing really, really well"--that would prove to be most fateful for the company. No sooner had it pledged to remain a specialist than it began to break its promise by branching into new markets, with far-reaching consequences not only for its own business but also for the Internet as a whole.

Google issued its philosophy at a decisive moment in its history. Although it had incorporated just three years earlier, in late 1998, its eponymous search engine was already widely viewed as the best tool available for navigating the net. But the company was struggling to make money. To succeed financially, its young founders, Stanford grad-school buddies Larry Page and Sergey Brin, knew they would have to supply not only search results but also advertisements tied to those results. At the time, the market for search-linked ads was dominated by another Internet startup, Overture, which had forged partnerships with major web portals like Yahoo, America Online, Ask Jeeves and Earthlink. Google's own advertising system, AdWords, was more sophisticated than Overture's, but big websites feared that the company, which operated its own site at Google. corn, might end up competing with them for online traffic. Google's high-toned philosophy, with its promise to stick to doing "one thing"--i.e., web search--"really, really well," was meant to reassure would-be partners that it wouldn't expand into their markets. The subtext was clear: "You can trust us; we're pure."

The tactic worked. During the course of 2002, Google signed advertising deals with a series of portals and other leading sites, including Earthlink, Ask Jeeves and, most important, America Online. It vanquished Overture, which would soon be acquired by Yahoo, and set itself on course to becoming the enormously profitable company it is today. Things didn't work out quite so well for Google's partners, many of which would come to rue the role they played in securing the fledgling company's success. As Google grew, it expanded well beyond its initial focus on search, jumping into markets for e-mail, news aggregation, instant messaging,

maps, financial advice and video distribution among many, many others. Although the phrase "It's best to do one thing really, really well" remained a part of Google's official philosophy, by the end of 2005 the company had added an asterisk to the principle. "Over time," a footnote coolly explained, "we've expanded our view of the range of services we can offer--web search, for instance, isn't the only way for people to access or use information--and products that [four years ago] seemed unlikely are now key aspects of our portfolio."

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