hypothesized what would be most effective by drawing on our own experience. Truth could not be objectively and rationally derived until we had actually made a decision and implemented it. When we guessed wrong, usage dropped and user email increased.
"Why can't I change my display font?" people demanded to know. "Isn't this still America?"
Arthur C. Clarke once postulated, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Our job on the UI team was to set the stage for the technological marvel that happened whenever someone conducted a search—to make Google's interface supernaturally simple to use. The choices we made may look painfully obvious, but that's a mark of the team's success. We didn't try to distract users with anything showy or ostentatious or follow the portal path of flashing colors, dazzling displays, and other hocus pocus. Instead, we presented a well-thought-out, unsullied space with nothing up its sleeve but an incomparable talent for pulling rabbits out of the black box of the Internet. Assuming, that is, you were looking for rabbits.
The UI team grew quickly. Everyone wanted to touch up Google's public face. We spun off a front-end production group to deal with implementation issues so we could stay focused on overall design philosophy. Schwim set up a UI lab for the front-end team with a dozen different computers and browser configurations and even a WebTV unit so they could avoid a repeat of the AOL-Verdana misstep. Even though we added more engineers, designers, and UI specialists, I remained the only resident writer.
Though I would never get under the hood and retool the code base, my aesthetic suggestions occasionally made it onto the site, and my text decrees increasingly carried the weight of authority. I started to feel a role defining itself around me. I couldn't be a tech leader or a design director. But I could be Google's word guy.
Chapter 6
Real Integrity and Thoughts about God
L ARRY AND SERGEY were not fond of the mainstay of Internet advertising—rectangular graphics called banners that flashed and screamed for attention in annoying ways—and they wouldn't put them on their Google. In fact, they weren't fond of advertising at all, because they felt taking money for ads provided an incentive to bias search results in the advertisers' favor. Still, they had listed ad sales in their original VC presentation as a possible source of income, and they were willing to consider it—if that could be done in a way that was targeted and useful instead of obnoxious.
Cost containment could only carry us so far. At some point Google would need to start generating revenue to survive. We were selling search services to other companies, which put us in competition with well-established players like Inktomi and AltaVista, and the upside potential didn't look fantastic. While Google was gaining a reputation as a search destination, we had no real standing as a provider of services to large enterprises.
That brought Larry and Sergey back to advertising. The logical course would be to outsource development to someone like DoubleClick, whose core competency was placing ads on websites. We were a search company, after all, not an ad network. Craig Silverstein made that case to Larry and Sergey.
"Why spend all the effort? Why get distracted by trying to make an ad platform?" he asked them.
"None of the existing ad platforms work with the kind of advertising we want to do," they replied. "So we'll have to write our own."
"I thought that was a good argument," Craig told me. "But still it made me sad."
The ads Larry and Sergey wanted to serve were all text, not like the intrusive banners that DoubleClick had helped make ubiquitous across the web. No one in early 2000 thought words alone could be effective compared with the glitz of animated GIFs (image files formatted for display online).
"The DoubleClick people we talked to didn't understand," Urs remembers. "They said, 'We
"Why can't I change my display font?" people demanded to know. "Isn't this still America?"
Arthur C. Clarke once postulated, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Our job on the UI team was to set the stage for the technological marvel that happened whenever someone conducted a search—to make Google's interface supernaturally simple to use. The choices we made may look painfully obvious, but that's a mark of the team's success. We didn't try to distract users with anything showy or ostentatious or follow the portal path of flashing colors, dazzling displays, and other hocus pocus. Instead, we presented a well-thought-out, unsullied space with nothing up its sleeve but an incomparable talent for pulling rabbits out of the black box of the Internet. Assuming, that is, you were looking for rabbits.
The UI team grew quickly. Everyone wanted to touch up Google's public face. We spun off a front-end production group to deal with implementation issues so we could stay focused on overall design philosophy. Schwim set up a UI lab for the front-end team with a dozen different computers and browser configurations and even a WebTV unit so they could avoid a repeat of the AOL-Verdana misstep. Even though we added more engineers, designers, and UI specialists, I remained the only resident writer.
Though I would never get under the hood and retool the code base, my aesthetic suggestions occasionally made it onto the site, and my text decrees increasingly carried the weight of authority. I started to feel a role defining itself around me. I couldn't be a tech leader or a design director. But I could be Google's word guy.
Chapter 6
Real Integrity and Thoughts about God
L ARRY AND SERGEY were not fond of the mainstay of Internet advertising—rectangular graphics called banners that flashed and screamed for attention in annoying ways—and they wouldn't put them on their Google. In fact, they weren't fond of advertising at all, because they felt taking money for ads provided an incentive to bias search results in the advertisers' favor. Still, they had listed ad sales in their original VC presentation as a possible source of income, and they were willing to consider it—if that could be done in a way that was targeted and useful instead of obnoxious.
Cost containment could only carry us so far. At some point Google would need to start generating revenue to survive. We were selling search services to other companies, which put us in competition with well-established players like Inktomi and AltaVista, and the upside potential didn't look fantastic. While Google was gaining a reputation as a search destination, we had no real standing as a provider of services to large enterprises.
That brought Larry and Sergey back to advertising. The logical course would be to outsource development to someone like DoubleClick, whose core competency was placing ads on websites. We were a search company, after all, not an ad network. Craig Silverstein made that case to Larry and Sergey.
"Why spend all the effort? Why get distracted by trying to make an ad platform?" he asked them.
"None of the existing ad platforms work with the kind of advertising we want to do," they replied. "So we'll have to write our own."
"I thought that was a good argument," Craig told me. "But still it made me sad."
The ads Larry and Sergey wanted to serve were all text, not like the intrusive banners that DoubleClick had helped make ubiquitous across the web. No one in early 2000 thought words alone could be effective compared with the glitz of animated GIFs (image files formatted for display online).
"The DoubleClick people we talked to didn't understand," Urs remembers. "They said, 'We
Similar Books
