The Google Guys (17 page)

Wong insists that Google is not just another company that creates a product and tosses it to the corporate attorneys to sign off on. “Privacy here is a concern for everyone, from our engineers to our executives. That's a really unique environment to work in. I don't think people always understand that aspect, or maybe they don't believe it, because there are certainly enough companies out there as a counterexample. But I believe it's true, and this is my group, so . . .” She trails off with a laugh.

Will these discussions continue as Google grows bigger and more powerful? If nothing else, Larry and Sergey will be forced to maintain this kind of structure to acknowledge and deal with complaints. If they compromise their ideals in the name of profit, they are likely to be less successful. Their ideals are what make Google stand out and engender trust from millions of people. Wong points out that when Google was young, it did not follow the example of other Internet companies, which regularly and deeply mined data about their users, sometimes selling the information to advertisers. “We didn't need to do that,” she notes, “and we're wildly successful.”

But on these issues, public perception is everything, and Google is struggling to convince users it's doing the right thing. Every move it makes as it grows more powerful is scrutinized and criticized. Telemarketers, spammers, and junk mailers have created huge skepticism about how any advertising megalith will use the data at its disposal, and there seems to be little Google can do about this.

Jim Barnett, the CEO of the online advertising firm Turn, sums up the sentiment: “The truth is that Google does care about user privacy and tries to be thoughtful about how it uses data. But they're also extremely competitive and are not bashful about trying to gain leverage in this competitive marketplace, which is what the DoubleClick acquisition was all about. It's a real concern. Google has extraordinary power in the online advertising space and the lion's share of search, and is growing every quarter. Advertisers are in the business of monetizing data, and Google has unique access to the data.”

Google's competitors are not bashful about trying to exploit those concerns. In late 2008, Microsoft and Yahoo announced their own promises to become better corporate citizens than Google when it came to privacy. Microsoft threw the ball in Google's court on December 8 by offering to cut the time it keeps user data to the EU-recommended six months—provided that Google and Yahoo did the same. Yahoo, which had the policy of retaining data for thirteen months, then took another shot on December 17 by saying it would cut retention time to just three months, except under limited circumstances. Ask was already offering a service that lets people opt out of any data retention, much as Google does when people download its toolbar option.

This now leaves Google looking like the bad guy, rather than the innovator trying to trim data retention as much as possible while minimizing the impact on the quality of its services. And it sets up a battle: which issue do users care more about—privacy or the quality of their searches?

These issues hurt. The “Don't be evil” company has rapidly risen to astounding name brand recognition and respect from consumers because of its policies. As Google gets bigger and as publicity over its policies spreads, its reputation is beginning to suffer, and its public stance against evil is becoming a liability.

Two organizations—TRUSTe, an online privacy advocate, and the Ponemon Institute, a think tank dedicated to privacy and data protection issues—have conducted an annual award for Most Trusted Company for Privacy since 2004. They survey more than six thousand U.S. consumers to collect opinions about which companies people feel are the most trustworthy and which do the best job of safeguarding personal information. From the beginning, Google consistently held the ranking as number ten or eleven on the list, except for two anomalies—2005 and 2008—when it dropped out of the top twenty altogether. In 2005 Google was getting a lot of publicity about its plans to enter the market in China. By contrast, Yahoo made it into the top twenty for the first time in 2008, into the fourteenth spot. Since Yahoo has had at least as many troubles as Google on the privacy and censorship front, the likely explanation is that supposedly non-evil Google gets vastly more publicity and criticism.

Fran Maier, CEO of TRUSTe, which monitors companies' online privacy policies and how well they're being enforced, acknowledges that the concern is largely fear of the unknown. “With Google, you have a company that pushes the envelope in a lot of different ways. They may be coming up with stuff that a lot of us have never seen before.” Maier also emphasizes that while neither Microsoft nor Google made the top twenty, they are still “way up there” on the list. “A lot of people feel comfortable with both of them.”

Larry Ponemon, the author of the study, told the
San Francisco Chronicle
that Google and Microsoft are suffering from “big company syndrome.” Simply put, he said, “People figure that if you're big and collecting data, there must be an issue.”

Google, it seems, is getting too big for the public's own good, and as a result, is increasingly seen as a bad wolf. Larry and Sergey do not like the idea of making goodwill gestures (e.g., cutting data retention time to three months) that they do not believe really serve their users' best interests. They assume that their logic will win out. This puts them in danger of losing the public relations war.

Google has more to lose than any of its competitors if it slips up. Such is the bane of anyone who publicly swears he will never be evil.

Everybody believes in something, and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, uses that something to support their own existence.

L
arry and Sergey have wanted to build an electronic library for books since they were at Stanford getting paid by the Digital Libraries Initiative. That concept was put on hold while they started up Google and focused on Web search, but it was never abandoned. The Internet does not have all the world's information, and almost none of the text that was created before 1995. But physical libraries are a rich storehouse of information created through the ages. Libraries are the obvious source to tap for books, since 95 percent of published works are now out of print. The largest libraries have spent decades or even hundreds of years building their collections, and some 75 percent of their inventory consists of books that are no longer being published, some of them very old. Sergey and Larry wanted to access that treasure every bit as much as the Ptolemy clan. The plan to realize that dream started coming together in 2002.

The first problem they had to face was how to get the books into digital form. They wondered how long it would take to scan and digitize every book in the world. So Larry decided to find out by scanning one book. He and Marissa Mayer, then a product manager, took a camera, a three-hundred-page book, and a metronome into his office. Using the metronome to keep time, Marissa turned the pages while Larry photographed each one. It took them forty minutes to capture all three hundred pages.

Larry and a small team then started visiting other book digitization projects, including one at his undergraduate alma mater, the University of Michigan. There he learned that the university estimated the time needed to digitize all seven million books it owned was one thousand years. He told University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman that Google could do it in six.

He also made what was then an unusual move for a software company by hiring robotics engineers to create a robotic page turner and scanner that could replace Marissa and Larry and their metronome. Such devices already existed on the market from other companies, but Larry thought that a good team at Google could do a better job by building a very gentle device that could handle older books with fragile pages. Software programmers at Google created a page-recognition software program that could recognize odd type sizes and unusual fonts in 430 different languages.

The team then started visiting large libraries to discuss their plan. At the Oxford University library, they examined centuries-old books that are stored carefully away and rarely brought out—and then only for qualified scholars. The Googlers talked enthusiastically about digitizing them and making them available to anyone. After more than a year of discussion, Oxford ended up becoming Google's first partner in the Google Print initiative (later renamed Google Book Search) with an agreement to digitize its collection of more than one million nineteenth-century books within three years.

That part was easy. Two-hundred-year-old books are no longer under copyright. But Larry also wanted more recent titles, some in print, some not. For this he needed the help of somebody who knew his way around the publishing business. He found a young man working at Random House named Adam Smith.

Smith is not your typical Google geek. Tall, thirtyish, athletically slim with neatly trimmed hair, he was loquacious on the day I met him, sporting the self-satisfied smile of someone who has been very successful and looking like the up-and-coming young publishing executive he once was. In 2003 Smith wrote an article in the
New York Times
about Random House's interest in going digital. It caught the attention of the boys at Google. In August of that year, he agreed to meet with Larry, corporate counsel David Drummond, and advertising executive Susan Wojcicki, who were going to be in New York in a couple of days. It wasn't to be a job interview, but Smith, a California native, hoped it would turn out that way. “I was thinking, this is my ticket back to California,” he says.

The meeting did not come off as planned. The Googlers showed up in New York just as a huge blackout shut down Manhattan. Google called Smith in for a formal interview in November. That's when he finally met Larry.

As usual, the meeting was more of an information dump than an interview. “Larry was intellectually curious about the publishing industry, how it worked, and what motivated them. He wanted to know what drives them and what they're interested in. He wanted very much to get insight to the industry in a way I would call ‘problem solving.' He said, ‘Publishers must have problems, so what can we do for them? This is a big industry, and the Internet is going to be playing some role. So how can Google look at this from a product standpoint?' ”

Larry was impressed enough with Smith's answers to hire him. Smith officially joined Google in December 2003. A year later Google announced its partnership to digitize the books of five libraries—those at Harvard, the University of Michigan, Oxford, Stanford, and the New York Public Library. In each case, Google would cover all the expenses. It was important to the culmination of their long-standing desire to build the world's biggest library. “From their days at Stanford, Larry and Sergey never really gave up on their dream of digitizing books,” says Smith.

The controversy started as soon as that initiative was announced. Officials at the French National Library immediately complained of bias. Just as the librarians of Alexandria heavily favored Greek volumes, the French complained that Google's program was biased in favor of English-language books. That controversy was quelled relatively easily. CEO Schmidt traveled to Paris to explain the program, and Google expanded it to foreign sources. This was Larry's intent from the start, his goals typically as ambitious as those of Ptolemy I. “We want all the world's books, in every language,” says Smith. “And we want to be able to search across the full text of all books.”

At first, they thought the idea of digitizing books would be easily palatable. For one thing, all publishers were watching the written word going digital and were struggling to find a way to join the revolution. “The industry was just coming off its first wave of ebook strategy,” recalls Smith. “They didn't get the traction they were expecting. It wasn't clear that, left to their own devices, they would be able to make electronic books available to the public.”