The Vergecast - Land of the Giants: The Google Empire

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

Vergecast is on vacation this week, so instead we'll share an episode of Land of the Giants from our friends at Recode. Land of the Giants is a podcast that explores the five biggest tech companies and their impact on our world, and this season is all about Google. The episode we're sharing tells the story of how two grad school students with a unique way to search the internet launched a company that would become the gateway to the internet for the entire world. In the rest of the season, Land of the Giants: The Google Empire will cover issues like Google’s relationship with the government, the origins of their antitrust troubles, and what their future may look like as they face off against Congress and the Biden Administration.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years,

covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of taking the week off. My name is Dieter Bone, and as you may have guessed, Nilai is off this week, and I was lucky enough to get a hold of a COVID-19 vaccine.

I got the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, and that was yesterday, which means that today I'm kind of feeling it a little bit. But there's very good news. Instead of listening to me, do an elegy for LG, phones that are no longer being made. I'm so sorry. Instead of that, or a bunch of the other tech news that we are still going to get to next week, we have an episode from our friends over at Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

It's called Land of the Giants, the Google Empire, and it's an entire season all about Google and how it turned into an empire. It's hosted by Shereen Gafari and Alex Cantorwitz, and it's really good. You should definitely give it a listen. We are presenting the first episode here, which is all about the founding of Google, you might sort of know some of the stories,

but there's a lot of really funny, interesting details here that you might not have heard before. The entire season runs through a bunch of different issues with Google from YouTube to the ad network to some very, very timely episodes about AI and ethics because there's been a bunch of stuff in that of the news the last month or two. I was actually participating a little bit

in some of the early development of this podcast, but I needed to back out, and I am really, really happy that instead of me, you've got Shereen and Alex. They've done an excellent job at this series, and you can binge the entire thing. The last episode on DoubleClick just came out, so you can listen to the entire thing.

But right here, right now, you can listen to the first episode, and you can find the whole thing wherever you find your podcast. So thanks so much for listening. We will be back next week to talk about a bunch of the tech news. We will talk about LG,

quitting the smartphone business. We want to talk about the new Sonos Rome Bluetooth speaker. I'm really interested in it. We'll probably talk about T-Mobile trying to do home internet over 5G, and I have emotions about that. But not as many emotions as dish.

who is super pissed at T-Mobile for the shenanigans they're doing and keeping DISH from achieving its goals, maybe. Anyway, all of that, all the weird tracker news that happened this week. A bunch of that's coming next week on the Vergecast. But right here, right now, you can listen to the first episode of Land of the Giants. In 1999, Marissa Meyer was sitting in the most important interview of her life. It was at a startup called Google. That meeting was at their conference table in the main conference room at 165 University,

which also happened to be a ping pong table. Meyer would go on to become one of the most prominent executives in Silicon Valley. From 2012 to 2017, she was CEO of Yahoo. But back in the late 90s, she was still a student at Stanford about to graduate with a master's in computer science. And Google's co-founder, Sergey Brin, was not going easy on her. Sergey did all the talking and quizzed me intensely on a lot of different computer science. topics had me draw out like the graphing of K-means clustering and centroids and how to find

the differences in the centers and things like that. Meyer was a star student, so she answered those questions no problem. But there was another interviewer in the room, and she noticed something was a little off with him. Larry seemed quiet and truthfully, honestly somewhat distracted. Larry Page, the other founder of Google. The pair wrapped the interview up early. They had something else on their minds.

And they let the door open so I could kind of hear what's going on our side. And then I heard, you know, let them call it and say, okay, like, who's going with us for the Kleiner pitch? Kleiner is in Kleiner Perkins, the legendary venture capital firm. And I heard a lot of foot traffic heading out the door. And then Heather Carnes, the office manager, reappeared and said, I'm sorry. Larry and Sergey had an important venture capitalist pitch this afternoon. and they have taken the majority of the company with them. So I think you're going to have to come back tomorrow.

The guy who Larry and Sergey needed to impress at Kleiner Perkins was John Doer. He was practically a midas of the dot-com boom. Door led Kleiner's early investments in Netscape and Amazon, and now Google needed his golden touch. They had a 24-page pitch deck, which I still have a copy of. Here's the business model on page 14. We're going to do branded search on www.gookle.com. We'll do co-branded web search and we'll do site search.

I want to tell you, that's not a business model. For an investor like Dorr, that didn't matter. He thought Larry and Sergey were wicked smart and almost unrealistically ambitious. They had a vision for search and for information in the Internet that was bigger than anyone I'd seen. from any of the founders that I'd met. Because Google's founders wanted to organize all the world's information. They looked at the world and understood how it is and imagined a different and better world

and that they could get there with technology. It's basically an industry cliche at this point for startups to say that they're using tech to change the world for the better. But Dora actually believed Larry and Sergei when they said it. So it was pretty easy for, me in our first meeting to come to the conclusion that I wouldn't mind getting into trouble with these guys. That's the first question I always ask of founders, because in building a business, you're going to get in trouble in one form or another. I'm Shereen Gafari, senior reporter at Recode.

I'll be hosting this season of Land of the Giants with my friend in big tech reporting, Alex Kantrowitz. Hey, Alex. Hey, Shereen. I've been covering Google for the past three years. I also grew up next to its headquarters in Silicon Valley. So I've been hearing stories about what it's like to work at Google since I was playing handball in the playground at recess. I'm not kidding. I can't say my inside knowledge of Google goes quite as far back as yours, but I did write a book about big tech called Always Day One. And I cover the industry at a publication I founded called Big Technology.

So there is something that has always stuck with me about Google. Of all the tech giants, we know that Apple's the richest, and Amazon is the most ruthless. Microsoft course is the most important to Enterprise and Facebook is the same. definitely the most controversial, but Google is the most powerful. Google is the filter through which we access the internet. If you're online today in most parts of the world, you're probably using Google. Sometimes it's obvious, like Gmail, Google Maps, or Google Search. But it's all so subtle. So you might be visiting a random website that seems to have nothing to do with Google and still be interacting with it. Because beneath the surface,

it's showing you Google ads, run on a Google Chrome browser, and power. powered by a Google Cloud server. Our lives are organized around these products, but we don't control how they work. Every decision Google makes, every tweak to its secretive algorithm, every little change to how it uses our personal data, every internal debate over company culture,

all of that impacts billions of people. I mean, Google is so important that its name is the verb for looking something up online. And if a website doesn't show up in the first few pages of a Google search, it's almost like it doesn't even exist. That's how much power Google has. John Doher must have sensed all this massive potential because even after that lackluster pitch back in 1999,

Kleiner wrote Google a big old check for $11.8 million. As we all know, that was only the beginning. Not only did they build the best search engine, but they built the best advertising company, the best advertising network, maps, mail, video, news, any one of those would be a highly valued company. They did all that in their first five years, and it continues to this day. So Google's ability to bundle all those hugely successful businesses into one giant company,

that was good news for its investors. But it also created some of that trouble Dora saw coming when Larry and Sergey were just getting started. It's been 20 years. Now, lots of people inside and outside Google are asking, is Google too big for its own good? And to get into that question, first we have to understand what was driving the company in its early days. Unlike some other major tech companies I've covered, Google was idealistic and value-driven from day one. That's what's so

unique about this company's story. The morality it proclaimed about its work, plus the naivete and its mission, would later become the company's biggest source of tension. So basically, to understand Google today, we need to know the people and ideas that shaped its beginnings. And one of those people was Terry Winnegrad. I mean, I think there was one article that referred to you as like the Yoda of Silicon Valley. And so I think that was based on looks. Terry Winograd's being pretty humble here. He's downplaying the fact that he's advised some of the most successful founders in tech history. What is your secret? So I have the same secret that the real estate agents always tell you. There's one thing that really makes it work, location, location, location.

That location? Stanford University. Winnegrad started teaching computer science there in 1973, back when Silicon Valley was practically an apple orchard. He retired in 2012, but early in his tenure, he met one of his most famous mentees. I actually met Larry when he was seven years old. Winnegrad remembers meeting Larry as a kid when his father, who was a professor, visited Stanford. Both of Larry's parents were accomplished computer science researchers, so it was only natural that he would follow the same path. When Larry got to Stanford, he had a lot of ideas about what to research, though some of those interests sounded more like science fiction. I remember him

coming in talking about space tethers, which had no, you know, it wasn't computer science, it wasn't even practical and certainly still isn't, basically. But he was fascinated by the question of, could you get into space through a space tether? And that was just the kind of thinking he did. You know, let's try it. Soon enough, Larry became friends with a fellow classmate who was game to humor his wild ideas, Sergei Bryn. Sergey was also the child of accomplished academics. His parents emigrated to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union when he was six.

And like Larry, Sergey grew up going to Montessori schools. And he was a little wacky. I mostly thought of him as, you know, the guy who works with Larry. He was kind of a character, it seems like, like I read stories about him rollerblading through the halls and... That's both of them. Both of them. Oh, yeah.

In spite of the signs up saying, no rollerblading. or blades allowed in the hallways. What were they like back then? I mean, they were these bright. Very bright and sort of cocky. You know, they very self-assured. When I talk to people who knew Larry and Sergei in their early days, their names mold into one, Larry and Sergey, or sometimes just Larry Sergei.

It slips off the tongue. It shows just how connected they were once he started putting their minds together. Even though they were also pretty different. Sergei was the more sociable one. He was naturally outgoing and quick to share his strong opinions on whatever. subject he was talking about. Larry was more reserved, but equally confident. They were decently likable, I mean, especially because we're in a nerd department. But that wasn't what brought it together. It wasn't their human skills. It was really

that they were smart and they were willing to try things. Like navigating the World Wide Web. This was back when the general population was just getting access to the internet. The volume of content online was exploding. Really, the web was as much of an unknown. known as space. And trying to find your way around that web in the mid-1990s was not pretty. Your best bet was to use the Yahoo Directory, which was literally a human-made list of websites, just like a cyber yellow pages. And if you did try a search engine, well, good luck.

The way I used to describe it is you would type in your search, go get a cup of coffee, and come back and see what it found. Larry could do better than that. But first, he'd need to see how all the pages on the internet connected, what the network looked like, and how the sites were linked. To do that, you'd just have to download and index everything on the internet. Every single web page. No big deal.

This was just the kind of challenge Sergey couldn't resist. Winigrad says the pair came to him to pitch their plan. Basically, I said, no, you can't do all that. And they said, oh, yes, we can. I said, well, go ahead and try. So Larry and Sergey started tapping into Stanford servers, and their map the web exercise ended up taking down the entire campus network. Freaking geniuses on Rollerblitz.

Yeah, but the project was a success. Through that web crawl, Larry and Sergey discovered something. A new, elegant way to sort information online. To get to the genius of Larry and Sergey's big idea, it helps to picture the web like a grand map. Imagine the links that connect to specific pages are like roads. Now, imagine that some of those pages look like cities. They've got many more links leading towards them than the other pages.

So those pages, the ones with all the roads heading to them, when those pages link to your page, some of their importance rubs off on you. And you get to be important too. You get to win at search. This sounds totally intuitive, but it was actually a full paradigm shift for how information had been sorted online.

For people searching the web, this made a huge difference. And it changed the power dynamics of the internet. Because it didn't matter who you were. You could be the New York Times or an independent blogger, When important pages linked to your website, you could be someone's number one search result. Larry Sergei translated their idea into an algorithm called PageRank, a play on Larry's last name, page. Now they would need a way to put that algorithm into practice. Give you a way to use it. And that's Google.

And Google worked really well, maybe too well for a dissertation. After all this effort, Larry Sergei faced a crossroads. They had to decide how to share this new ranking system they'd invented. I think they were hesitant because they felt that it was, quote, the secret sauce, right? It was the thing that was going to make their certainty better than everybody else's. And if that's the case, you don't put it out there for everybody else to use. On the other hand, they had an academic attitude and they felt if they did something that was intellectually really interesting, it should be published in the literature. When I hear this, I have this vision of two angels on Larry Sergei's shoulders.

One told them publish PageRank as an academic paper. And the other whispered, whisk this idea away from Stanford and build this thing into a mega company. Because this was the mid-1990s. Internet startups were the hottest companies on the planet. But Larry Sergei weren't in it for the Internet riches. Or so they say. I will say that when we started Google, we did it out of desperation.

That's Larry Page. He didn't speak to us for this podcast. Neither did Sergey. They infamously avoid the press these days. But here he is in 2002, doing an interview at Stanford. An interview in which he reveals that he and Sergey tried to find a way to satisfy both those academic and entrepreneurial instincts. We actually tried to license Google to other search companies. We talked to them. We wanted to finish our PhDs.

None of them were interested. Larry Sergei went to excite Infoseek, two other search engines of the time. They wanted to license their idea. But no one was really compelled by Google. According to Sergei, they didn't mind search being a bit clunky. And we really didn't believe that was true. We think, you know, search is really important to people. That's how you get information, which is really critical to you.

And so we said about creating our own. Sergey delivered this line on the Charlie Rose show in 2001. What he's saying is that starting Google, the company, wasn't his first choice. It was something he had to do. The part of this story that really strikes me, though, is Larry and Sergey's sense of sacrifice. The way Larry tells it, it feels like leaving their PhDs behind was like leaving home. You can hear it in his voice. He actually lost something when he started at Google.

But the two founders would be martyrs for the cause of accessible information. There is some serious eubris in this story. Right. It sounds like Larry Sergey really believe the world should not, could not, go on without Google. The world's information needed some organizing. And they, Larry and Sergey, were the ones to do it. But if Larry Sergei had to leave Stanford, maybe they could still take some of it with them. Oh, yes, they could.

Larry and Sergey's first hire for Google was another student from their PhD program named Craig Silverstein. And they were not done recruiting. Sergey also wanted to hire Heather Carnes, a graduate administrator from their department. And I said, no, thanks. I've got a career. You kids are cute. I'm flattered, but, you know, I didn't want to ruin. my future by going to a startup company that would be pretty much gone in two years. Carnes had seen a side of Sergei maybe others in their nerd department didn't know.

Carnes was an artist, and Sergey did some art himself. So she remembers he dropped by her office to show her his paintings, which she wasn't too impressed by, but he was still impressed with her. So when it came to that job offer, he wouldn't take no for an answer. They asked me to come down to dinner at the Mandarin Gourmet and Palo Alto, and they kind of talked me into it. And that is how a year later, Heather Carnes found herself telling Marissa Meyer to come back the next day to finish up her interview at the ping pong table. Carnes quickly became a key figure in shaping early company culture. My job description was, and I quote, you're going to do the stuff that we don't want to do.

It was the glamour of that job description that really drew me in. Carnes had a unique role. She wasn't an engineer. The engineers, they came in late and worked into the night. Carnes was used to a nine to five. So I would have to kind of figure out, huh, I'm sitting alone, especially early on. What is my job exactly?

So what I did really for the first two weeks, I wrote the employee handbook. I wrote the manual where most of my job, My policies are pretty much still in place today. And surprise, surprise. I plagiarized the Stanford University student handbook because I know that's where they were from and that's where a lot of our new employees were going to come from.

So I basically planned to let them come out of the womb to a very warm, safe, fuzzy place. To Carnes, Larry Sergey, were kids. When she talked to our lead producer, Megan Cunane, she joked she was the designated aunt in the office. Did you trust them as founders? No. Because, you know, here's these, by the way, I was probably almost 10 years and still am almost 10 years older than they were.

I felt that they had a beautiful life. You know, they had parents that cared, that nurtured them, that understood that they were prodigies. I didn't get the feeling that they had much work experience. For example, I waited on tables to get through college. I had to pay my own way for everything. But in a way, Larry Sergei's lack of work experience fundamentally shaped Google's culture. They built a workplace unlike any other.

They built an office that ran much more like a university than a typical corporation. I would like to impress upon everybody that they were first and foremost inventors. Early Google was basically a Willy Wonka factory for nerds. Come with me and you'll be in a world of pure imagination. It was not unusual, for example, for Carnes to spot Larry and Sergei playing with Legos. She remembers a specific time when she walked in on Larry, Sergey, and Craig Silverstein,

working with a rubber wheel on paper. And I was asking them, what are you doing? Aren't you supposed to be building a search engine? And they said, well, we're trying to figure out a way to turn pages without a human being. And I said, why? What does that have to do with anything? And they said, well, we hope we can digitize all the world's information and make it available to everybody. But the slowdown is needing a human to turn pages in order to scan that.

Larry Sergey were all about eliminating slowdowns and not just for themselves. There was very little red tape. People were encouraged to invent things, and it was a big recruiting draw, because rarely were you able to create something in work and have it be seen by the rest of the world like the next day. And that was an important aspect of Google that you could, especially as a computer scientist, invent something that was alive and usable. And just like to do is Want to change the world There's nothing to it And just like Willy Wonka's factory Google was a technicolor candy land While all the other more traditional companies were gray

That difference felt really important to the industry Because Google was a place where people believed above all else In invention and creativity in imagination. And if you were a young engineer bursting with big ideas, Google felt like one of the only places in tech that would really honor that ambition. Google was also a candy land in some superficial ways.

Like, this is how Carnes remembers an early Google recruiting event. So they had this genius idea to basically have parties at night on the weekend where they'd hand out T-shirts. I mean, we would set up thematic parties with teaky bars and totem poles. But in order to enter, you had to bring your resume. And in order to qualify, you had to be working on a degree in computer science or

engineering. This sounds like a college party more than a professional event. And maybe not a party that everyone would want to go to to find a job. But by 1999, Larry Sergey had put together a team too big for their house slash office. So they headed to a real workplace in Palewal The Heart of Silicon Valley. And they were about to face another crossroads, one that would put pressure on Google's open, creative, inventive workplace. Because, of course, Google wasn't part of a fictional world where innovation is powered by Willy Wonka's pure imagination. Google was a company in the real world, and it would need to start making some serious money. After the break, Larry Sergei set their own rules of business and lay the foundation for Google, the empire.

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Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. Marissa Meyer was Google employee number 20. When she started, the company made money by licensing its search technology. Basically, Google would tell major companies that had lots of disorganized information on their websites, hey, pay us a fee and we'll make your websites more searchable because we're the best at search. And one day, Meyer remembers, the Washington Post agreed to talk. And Joan Brad, I, are early.

sales director was taking the meeting. Pretty soon, the whole company heard about this meeting. It was exciting. This was a chance for Google to land a deal with a major media company. But one Googler was concerned. An engineer named Amit Patel got very upset about this meeting with Joan. He became really upset and concerned because he was worried that Joan might tell the Washington Post that, you know, will put an article that they think is more important first in

the search results or, you know, not. not be as comprehensive if they didn't want us to be things that he really viewed would compromise our integrity. The way Meyer tells it, essentially, Patel was worried that Google would sell out. Google's search was so good, so different from everything else when it came out, because when you searched on Google, the most relevant information came first. That wasn't the case for other search engines. Some of Google's competitors let advertisers pay their way to the top of results. And it was hard to tell what was an ad. Meyer says Patel didn't want the Washington Post to think that if they were writing checks to Google, Google would rank their articles any better.

And so the day before, I remember he walked around the office and he asked all these people, like, what do you think she's in a promise? What do you think they're going to ask for? But by close of business day before the meeting, Patel seemed to have calmed down. And Meyer assumed he just worked things out with Joan. And it turned out instead what he had done. He had this very neat handwriting, which I affectionately used to call Patel Sansa. because his last name was Patel. And so Joan started the meeting the next day. And when she looked at the whiteboard, it was a blank whiteboard because it had been erased

before the meeting. But in the lower left-hand corner in a meet's incredibly neat handwriting, it said, tiny little letters, don't be evil. Don't be evil. If you know anything about Google's culture, you know those three words. Don't be evil. Don't be evil became arguably the most. important principle at the company. It's catchy, it's quotable, it's mockable, especially today when

Google's critics accuse the company of ethical breaches and monopolistic business practices. But to people working at Google, it wasn't just empty corporate speak. Engineers like Don't Be Evil, it was a simple directive to guide them along their way on their ambitious mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible. Googleers liked it so much that it became an official Google value. Sometime after Patel's whiteboard reminder, HR put on a formal exercise to come up with official core values for the company.

And another influential engineer named Paul Buhite, who also came up with Gmail, by the way, suggested that they just used don't be evil. Paul was the one who we brought it up again then and said, you know, look, can we just dispense with this exercise? We have our core value, it's don't be evil. Like, let's just have that be the core value. And you can let us all go back to, you know, our engineering.

We asked other people about this story. Joan Braddy, through Google, says she doesn't recall the Washington Post meeting. Paul Bukhite actually remembers that he was the first to come up with Don't Be Evil during the HR exercise, and it was after that that Patel started scribbling the phrase all over the place. But Bukhite did say that he shared an office with Meyer and Patel at the time, so it's possible Patel, quote, implanted, unquote, the mantra in Buchite's mind, inception style. Basically, this was over 20 years ago, so it makes sense the grand don't be evil origin

story has a couple different variations depending who you talk to. What matters is that the idea stuck. Not everyone took the new mantra as a sacred scripture, though, like Heather Carnes from HR. I thought it was naive and maybe a little silly. And I don't really understand. I guess I did understand what they meant by evil, but that's just a word I would never put in a mission statement for any reason. I don't know. Like, don't be satanic. I don't know. Like, don't be satanic. I don't I'm thinking more, hey, when you're 200 people, is this still your mission statement? If we continue to grow and succeed, is all of this going to be child's play, I guess? It wasn't a normal value, but Google wasn't a normal company.

Remember, it had that mix of naivete and hubris. The moment Patel scribbled don't be evil onto that whiteboard, he was actually declaring himself and the other rank-and-file engineers, the stewards of Google's ethics. And not just stewards of deciding what's evil for the company, but for Google's users, too. But the thing is, not being evil isn't so simple, because tensions inevitably arise as you grow.

The bigger you get, decisions that used to be simple become complicated. And Google wanted to be big. So Google needed a bigger business model than licensing search. We thought about sure. should people pay directly for search? Should you pay like a $20 per year subscription for search? Let's pause for a second to consider what might have been,

because it wasn't inevitable that Google would be free. The search engine could have always been a luxury internet good for the wealthy, right? You're rich, you search. Or an academic tool. But that would cut off a lot of the world. And that's not the world that Larry and Sergey wanted. And as we thought about it, we realized that we could actually optimize both for revenue, and for user happiness by allowing ads?

An attempt to optimize for revenue and happiness? Hmm. The way Google decided to make money in those early days is fascinating. I mean that. To get the backstory, you have to meet Jen Fitzpatrick. She's an early Google engineer who had a hand in many of the most successful products in all of Google's history. One of those products was AdWords, Google's first ad product.

Marissa Meyer hired Fitzpatrick in 1990. Right out of, you guessed it, Stanford University. Fitzpatrick is now one of the highest ranking executives at the company. Her official title is Senior Vice President of Google's Core Systems and Experiences. Which is really the infrastructure that power some of our biggest services from search to ads to YouTube to Gmail to maps and more. Just describing her role took Fitzpatrick 30 seconds, literally. Literally. Privacy, security.

A lot of the things that kind of underpin and are shared and use spot. by all of Google's different products and services. But back to the 90s when not much of that stuff existed. AdWords was really the moment where ads at Google took off in a big way. AdWords is a simple but brilliant way to make money from search. Let me talk you through it. When you're searching for something to buy, you often type in exactly what you want, right? That's called declaring your purchase intent in advertising speak.

So let's say you live in Wisconsin. and you're in the market for a new car. You'd Google something like car dealerships in Madison. Google would then show you results for car dealerships, and AdWords gives advertisers a chance to get on that page and say, hey, how about me? So if you're a Hyundai dealership in Madison, those searches for car dealerships near you are gold.

Giving advertisers this path to customers could be gold for Google, too, just as long as they didn't ruin the search experience. Google put a lot of thought into how the ads would show up on the page. How we would distinguish ads from search results and trying to be really transparent about what was paid and what was organic. Because Google didn't want users to confuse ads with search results. So they made ads look distinct, putting them off to the side or highlighting them in yellow.

Regular search still operated how it always had. But ads gave businesses this elegant way to get to the specific eyeballs they wanted, based on what people were searching for. That was always a big part of the idea and the intent is that done right ads should be helpful and relevant and a way to help in those types of commercial queries to be able to deliver helpful information to users, but also make money while doing so. But here's attention. Google definitely wants you the user to have a great experience. But let's be real. You're not the one paying the bills. That car dealership is. Which means Google has split loyalties.

It wants both search users and advertisers to be happy. But there's no way around it. The Google user and the advertiser will have different agendas. You want what's most useful. Advertisers want you to buy something. This tension isn't inherently evil. Advertising can be useful, like Fitzpatrick says, but it would make don't be evil a tough standard to live up to.

Google continued to grow its advertising business. and how some of those advertising products track people across the web, collecting user data along the way, worries digital privacy advocates and lawmakers. The point is, over the years, Google would twist itself into a pretzel, trying to satisfy both its users and its own need for revenue, and sometimes market dominance. But Googlers still worked with Don't Be Evil as a guide, including Marissa Meyer. Now when people talk about don't be evil, you know, sometimes they quest, oh, is it just, you know, mantra. I just wonder if it personally impacted any of the business decisions you made or if it was

ever something that came up in conversations when you were leading so many of these influential products. Absolutely. I mean, never because we were contemplating, doing something bad. But if we ever just felt like, wait, you know, there's two different paths we could go down here. You know, we would debate, you know, which ones do we think would do more good for the users. In 2018, Google quietly move the phrase don't be evil from the top down to the very bottom of its code of conduct. But we're still trusting Google to do right by us.

Each time we check our email, take notes, look up COVID-19 statistics, or plug directions into Google Maps while we're driving. So I'm putting in 1600. Is it amphitheater? Yeah. In a quarter mile, turn right onto amphitheater, Parkway. Google's talking to me.

All right, now. Now they're done. But yeah, I'm going to 1600 Amphitheater Parkway in Mountain View, California, and that is the Googleplex. In December 2020, Alex and I met up at the Googleplex, the company's headquarters. Okay, here I am. You can tell because you see all this like red, yellow, and blue primary color googly stuff. You go ahead. Usually over 25,000 people work at the Googleplex, but when we visited, it was empty.

Okay, so there's a sign on this Google Green. lawn chair and it says this space is closed as a precaution against COVID-19 this applies to the massage rooms game rooms gyms pools shower rooms laundry makerspaces music rooms meeting pods and miscellaneous seating wow that is quite a list I mean that's it that's all the Google perks right there on one side I was about to say I just learned about Google perks just by learning about the perks they've Shut down. Even in the absence of actual Google employees, you can still feel the whimsy of Google's early culture. Everything is painted the same colors as Google's logo, the food trucks, bicycles, lawn chairs.

Even the potted plants are Googly, red, blue, yellow, and green. And there's like a green Android statue, little Android robot that waves at you. And what else? Beach, volleyball, courts. Looking around at all this whimsy, I still couldn't help but think of the last time I was at this campus, when its courtyards were filled with thousands of angry Google employees who felt like their company in that moment was not a good place to be. Google had a major reckoning with its internal culture in November of 2018, lit by the match of a sexual harassment scandal. The New York Times reported that Google protected executives who were accused of sexual harassment for,

years, including Android co-founder Andy Rubin. Rubin walked away with a $90 million exit package, even after the company found credible claims of sexual misconduct against him. Rubin denies these claims, but Googlers were livid. We do hold ourselves to such high moral standards, especially our mantra of don't be evil. I mean, this to me is the epitome of evil. Days after the Times revealed the damning allegations about Rubin. Over 20,000 Google employees walked off the job in protest, demanding the company take accountability on sexual harassment in the workplace. It was a historic showing of dissent in tech,

and it was unthinkable that this could happen at Google, which was supposed to be the happiest of all the tech companies. But the Google walkout was about more than just one executive getting away with bad behavior. The protest opened a Pandora's box of long brewing issues inside Google, how it pays its cafeteria workers and other contractors, whether it's doing enough to hire women and people of color, if it should be selling its products to law enforcement. Beneath the Willy Wonka veneer, these tensions always existed at Google. The walkout just shattered Google's once pristine image of being a techie wonderland.

And if sexual harassment was in its upper ranks, there was a fear that that rock could trickle down through its culture to the end user too. In other words, if Google's own employees couldn't trust the company not to be evil, how could users? It's not just Google's employees who are uneasy about the future of the company. It's people on both sides of the aisle in some of the most powerful seats of our government. From the ultra-right-wing congressman, Jim Jordan. I'll just cut to the chase. Big tech's out to get conservatives. To progressive senator, Elizabeth Warren.

In 2012, FTC staff concluded that Google was using a... its dominant search engine to harm its rivals. There is a lot to tell in the story of Google. There are its great inventions, its endless ambition, its work culture that's getting scrutinized like never before. This season, we are going to ask why Google employees are fighting over the ethos of the company, what its next big invention is going to be, if it ever finds one as biggest search, and how it's grappling with organizing the world's information

when the very nature of what is fact and what is false is up for debate. We're going to bring you through the evolution of a small garage startup to a company so big, the U.S. government is accusing it of being a monopoly. We're interrogating what it took to get that big, at what cost. And what it means for the rest of us to live in the land of this giant. Next week, two tech giants declare war. It's Google versus Apple. When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, Google was actually working on its own mobile project, Android.

Now, most of the world's phones run on Android, and we will tell the story of how Google achieved that dominance. It's a story of betrayal among the top founders in Silicon Valley. Jobs went crazy. He just went crazy. He felt like he'd been stabbed in the back. And, more importantly, it's the story of how Google decided it needed to become a giant to survive at all.

Land of the Giants, the Google Empire, is a production of Recode by Vox and the Vox Media podcast network. and Kunane is the show's lead producer. Lisa Soap is our editor. Nathan Miller is our associate producer and engineer this episode. Emily Sen is our fact checker. Our theme song was composed by Galpham Shrikashen. Sam Altman is Recoad's editor-in-chief.

Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishak Kerwa is our executive producer. I'm Alex Cantorwitz. You can check out my weekly interview series Big Technology podcast on your favorite podcast app. And I'm Shireen Gafari. If you like this episode, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and tell a friend. And subscribe to hear our next episode when it drops.

Quick disclosure, Vox.com and Vox Media create content for and do business with Google. None of the people creatively involved with this season of Land of the Giants are involved with those projects.