I'm Feeling Lucky (33 page)

The more pages in an index, the more information there was about who linked to whom. And just as important to Google, the more information there was about what those links said. The wording of an actual hyperlink is the anchor text. Associating anchor text with the content of the page it pointed to turned out to be enormously helpful. For example, some links to the University of California at Berkeley contained its Spanish name or synonyms like "Cal" or "Bears." Sometimes, however, relying too heavily on anchor text caused problems.

"Some anchor text was good and some was not so good," Jeff explained. "The query 'cold lemon soufflé' used to bring up MapQuest's homepage." One website used that exact phrase in a link to MapQuest, and Google gave the association too much weight. Another example was "more evil than Satan." In 1999 that search brought up Microsoft's homepage.
^*
Sergey instructed Cindy to tell reporters it was the result of an "anomaly caused by quantum fluctuations in web space," a nonsense phrase that was repeated verbatim in stories purporting to explain the glitch.

Sometimes deceptive link language was intentional. Webmasters realized they could affect the ranking of results for certain search terms by intentionally pointing to pages with very specific anchor text, a trick that came to be known as "Googlebombing." The Googlebomb that caused me the biggest headache was "dumb motherfucker." Around the time of the 2000 presidential election, conducting a search for what we euphemistically called "DMF" brought up an online store selling George Bush campaign merchandise. As the person responsible for customer service, I held up the umbrella as crap rained down on us from outraged supporters of the president. I got in touch with the Bush website people and explained that it was not an intentional slight by Google. Then I drafted a message saying the same thing for our customer service representatives to use as a reply to users. The best reply, though, came from someone already familiar with the issue.

A couple of months after the Supreme Court ended the 2000 election, Eric Schmidt invited his friend Al Gore to speak at Google about the campaign, the Internet, the environment, and whatever else Gore wanted to talk about.

Gore zipped into TGIF on one of our many electric scooters. "I just rode in from Washington," he said to approving laughs as he dismounted and took the microphone. "You may know me as the man who used to be 'the next president of the United States,'" he joked, garnering thunderous applause. When question time came, a Googler asked Gore if he was familiar with the Bush Googlebomb. He was.

"So what's your opinion about it?" came the follow-up question.

Gore paused and looked around a bit, as if checking for camera crews or reporters. There weren't any, though the room was packed with Googlers sitting in folding chairs and standing on cubicle desks to get a better look.

"Well," he said at last, with a completely neutral expression, "I do believe you might have discovered artificial intelligence."

Users would orchestrate many more Googlebombs in the years to come, from "French military victories," which led to a fake Google error page that read, "Your search—'French military victories'—did not match any documents. Did you mean French military
defeats?
" to "out of touch management," which, immediately before Google's IPO, directed users to the page on
Google.com
featuring profiles of our own executive team. That alone should prove to cynics that Google does not manipulate its search results or inject bias on a case-by-case basis.

Each time a Googlebomb detonated it blew my schedule to hell. I'd have to drop everything to smother the flame wars that might damage our brand. User support cast ominous shadows across my world, but the poor grunt who faced the unending deluge of incoming missives was our sole customer service rep, Max Erdstein.

Fresh out of Stanford with a degree in history, Max had offered to do whatever needed to be done at Google, which initially meant working on writing projects like the Google Friends newsletter and responding to user email. After Cindy restructured the marketing group, Max moved into my world, dragging behind him responsibility for Google's rickety user-support department, which at the time consisted of Max, a laptop, and an off-the-shelf copy of Microsoft Outlook.

Max never envisioned customer service becoming an omnivorous blob consuming all his time, but soon he found himself responding robotically to more than a thousand emails a day from users around the world. Crushed under the load, he could do little more than succinctly reply, "Thanks! Keep on Googlin!" Non-English emails presented the biggest problem. We had no idea if people wanted to praise us or harangue us. We tried using off-the-web translation software, but it left us more confused than when we began.

Meanwhile, there were rumblings from sales VP Omid that supporting advertisers and search-services customers should be a higher priority. Could Max help with that, too? After all, unlike users, these people were actually paying us. Max was emptying an ocean with a teaspoon. As the backlog of unanswered emails began to swell, Sergey offered a useful perspective. "Why do we need to answer user email anyway?" he wanted to know.

To Sergey's thinking, responding to user questions was inefficient. If they wrote us about problems with Google, that was useful information to have. We should note the problems and fix them. That would make the users happier than if we wasted time explaining to them that we were working on the bugs. If users sent us compliments, we didn't need to write back because they already liked us. So really, wouldn't it be better not to respond at all? Or at best, maybe write some code to generate random replies that would be fine in most cases?

Given their lack of concern about unanswered email, the founders were not sympathetic to Max's distress over the monotonous and unfulfilling nature of his work. Besides, when Google started, Larry and Sergey had answered all the email themselves, and written the code, and designed the logo, and handled press inquiries. We had more resources now, so how could anyone complain, given that we all had such small shards of responsibility in the wake of the big bang that was Google's conversion from a two-person project to a full-fledged corporation?

Eventually I realized that the answer, as always, was in the data. In the spring of 2000, I had Max start quantifying how many emails per day he received and responded to. I plotted the data on a chart and estimated Max's maximum capacity, then extrapolated how many Max-equivalents we would need to answer all email within forty-eight hours of receiving it. The data clearly showed that we would require at least one more Max as well as better tools for managing the email itself.

Reluctantly, and under pressure from Omid, eStaff gave us a green light to hire another customer service representative (CSR) and to buy an electronic customer-relationship-management (CRM) system. I immediately began the search for both, a task that took on increased urgency that summer, when Max moved into his new role helping advertisers generate better returns from their AdWords campaigns. The sales team nicknamed him "The Maximizer."

I had tried contractors even before Max left, but the generic office temps who showed up couldn't grasp the subtleties of search protocols or master the intricacies of our epistolary style. Max trolled Stanford's campus networks and landed a couple of prize candidates, including Anna Linderum, an international student who donated her time because we couldn't legally pay her, and Rob Rakove, a poly sci major. They quickly mastered the art of providing intelligent answers to befuddled users.

Meanwhile, after five months of rejecting applicants, I hired Denise Griffin in October 2000 to fill the role of full-time CSR. Surprisingly few candidates had the temperament and writing skills necessary to represent Google with the grace and grammar the job required. Denise had the requisite ability, a Berkeley degree, and community service experience that Sergey found appealing.

The day Denise started we were three thousand emails behind. Issues kept popping up like the methane fires dotting the grass-covered landfill down the street. A porn star desperately needed us to remove her home phone number from our index. History buffs claiming Israel had sunk a U.S. warship in 1967 objected to being classified as a hate group in our directory. Turks were outraged by an ad about genocide targeted to the keyword "Turkey." And those were the minor complaints. We were reaching the limits of what our Outlook software could handle, and user questions were becoming more complex and time-consuming to answer.

Our email output slowed from Sergey's remembered (and perhaps unconsciously optimized) personal response rate of one per minute to a more languid pace of one every three minutes. Of course, Denise and Rob couldn't pull answers out of their heads as Sergey had, but in his eyes that didn't excuse lower productivity. Then Cindy found some week-old unanswered emails that could have resulted in negative press.

"The situation is getting out of control," she warned me. "You need to get it in hand."

You know that dream where you're trying to run away from some menacing figure and your legs turn into melted marshmallows? I felt my feet mired in the sticky mess of text that was our user base asking for help.

I went back to the only solution that ever worked. I argued the numbers with Salar and convinced him to support a push for another CSR for our group. Omid put in a separate request for a service person for advertising clients. With two additional staffers, we would be able to make progress for at least a couple of months, until the volume of mail doubled again. Prompted by Salar, Sergey agreed to let us hire another CSR.
One
CSR, that is, to handle both the user support and advertising jobs. It wouldn't be enough, but it was better than nothing.

Since so much incoming mail was not in English, I sent out a note asking Googlers to list their language abilities in hopes of tapping in-house translation skills.

The languages spoken by staff included Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Hebrew, Romanian, and Swedish, but that didn't help me. Engineers didn't have the time or inclination to sift through foreign-language spam all day looking for urgent messages. We needed better technology to sort the mail, store common responses, and send bulk replies, but choosing the right customer-relationship-management (CRM) software required engineering skill to evaluate the efficiency and security of the code we'd be installing. Engineering project manager Mieke Bloomfield agreed to help me separate the good bits from the bad.

Mieke and I quickly learned that Google's trivial needs didn't impress big CRM firms. They focused on companies managing extensive sales operations and providing product support for thousands of paying customers. We didn't need to identify potential big spenders, and we had no desire to create buyer profiles. We just wanted a tool that could track basic metrics around volume and response rates. And we didn't want to spend a ton of money. Unfortunately, it was a seller's market.

Kana, which Wall Street dubbed the leader in the CRM space, had just split its stock at an adjusted high of about fifteen hundred dollars a share. Wall Street believed CRM tools were as essential to the web economy as shovels at a gold rush, and their sellers priced them accordingly. The cheapest solution from Kana's rival eGain cost more than a hundred thousand dollars. Larry and Sergey would have preferred to write our replies longhand with quill pens rather than sink that amount into someone else's code. Nor were the vendors willing to bend very far to accommodate a small startup like ours. Any features we wanted to add could only be considered during their regular development cycle and would be incorporated only if they were beneficial for their other, more significant clients.

So we looked at second-tier firms that offered stripped-down versions we could strip down even further. After evaluating a half dozen, we settled on a year-old company I'll call "Miasma" that offered what we needed: a simple solution to routing mail, a way to store a list of responses, and support for some foreign languages. Miasma proposed to give us five seats (that is, individual user licenses) plus a one-year maintenance contract and installation at a total cost of thirty-five thousand dollars, plus travel expenses for their technicians to come and plug everything in. I thought that was relatively reasonable.

"The technology's okay, I guess," Sergey told me after seeing a live demo, "but they should pay us to implement it. They need reference clients, and we're growing very quickly. They could learn a lot from watching how our usage changes. And make sure to get two extra licenses for Larry and me. They should throw those in for free because it doesn't cost them anything and we'd be good test users."

Miasma wouldn't pay us, but they did cut their price almost in half, including five seat licenses and the cost of traveling out to install their product, contingent on our willingness to act as a reference for them (evidently Sergey's logic was not entirely unconvincing). We scheduled an install date and awaited the arrival of the technology that would simplify our lives.

Miasma's techs worked industriously to get the software up and running while training us to write rules for routing mail to the proper queues and for forwarding messages to our staff "experts" for translation or sales follow-up. Everything was going according to plan, and though we were falling even further behind during the transition period, I was confident we had put into place a scalable solution to a growing problem. We said goodbye to the install team, certain that we would be caught up on our email in no time.