; I'm Feeling Lucky | Google Operating System News

Sunday 24 July 2011

I'm Feeling Lucky


I'm Feeling Lucky, the Book

You must have seen this message when installing Google Toolbar in Internet Explorer: "Please read this carefully. It's not the usual Yada Yada."


If you've ever used orkut, you probably remember the famous error message: "Bad, bad server. No donut for you."


Remember Mentalplex, Google's first April Fools' Day joke?


What about the "10 things Google has found to be true"?


All of these were written by Doug Edwards, Google's director of consumer marketing and brand management from November 1999 to March 2005. Doug was "the voice of Google", the one who wrote the text for Google's corporate pages and FAQs. He's now the author of the book "I'm Feeling Lucky" (Google BooksAmazon), which tells the story of the five years he spent at Google.


"Google was becoming my own personal publishing platform. (...) We had built a global bully pulpit and my voice rolled forth from it, My thoughts, my ideas, my imprecations would be seen by more people than read the New York Times or watched a network newscast. I was the man behind the curtain giving voice to the all-knowing Oz, and I tried not to let it go to my head," remembers Doug.

He came up with the name "AdWords", a cross between "AdsDirect" and "BuyWords", two other names suggested for Google's online ad service.

Doug was the marketing directer of a company whose founders didn't want to spend too much money on marketing. "Efficiency. Frugality. Integrity." These were Google's most important principles. "Growing by word of mouth suited Larry and Sergey's animosity toward advertising. They scoffed at profligate startups and their Superbowl spots, because TV ads lacked accountability. (...) 'If we can't win on quality', [Larry] said quietly, 'we shouldn't win at all.' In his view, winning by marketing alone would be deceitful, because it would mean people had been tricked into using an inferior service against their own best interests."

Actually, Google created a marketing department because "a board member or a friend from Stanford had insisted the founders needed people to do staff that wasn't engineering."

Douglas shares a lot of interesting things about the early days of Google, when the company struggled to rewrite Google's original code, build a scalable infrastructure, convince major portals like Yahoo and AOL to use Google's search technology and find a way to monetize search. Google started with a great idea, but turning a research project into a successful company wasn't easy. Hiring smart people and creating a flat organization that replaced bureaucracy with meritocracy helped a lot. "Great things would come from packing [engineers] tightly together so that ideas bounced into one another, colliding and recombining in new, more patent ways," remembers Douglas.

Google has always been the anti-corporation, where you could question authority and where engineers were in the driving seat. That's probably the reason why "don't be evil" became Google's mantra. As Google became a bigger company, "don't be evil" helped Google stay true to itself. Even when Google did evil things, like testing ads mixed with search results, the mantra was always there to show the right path.

Douglas had an increasingly important role: from a marketing director that tried to promote Google without spending too much money to the voice of Google, the one who wrote or adjusted most of the text from Google's pages. He questioned many decisions of Google's co-founders, from adding daily doodles to creating an ad service that didn't require moderation, but he later realized that they were great ideas. A former marketing manager at Mercury News, Douglas had to change a lot of habits at Google, while learning a lot in the process.

His decision to leave the company came after he realized that a major Google reorganization made his role unnecessary. "I had started at a small startup as a big-company guy. Now I was leaving a big company as a small-startup guy." Douglas thinks that Google's main flaw is the "impatience with those not quick enough to grasp the obvious truth of Google's vision." After leaving the company, he found himself "impatient with the way the world works" and discovered a lot of problems in everyday life. "Smart people, motivated to make things better, can do almost anything."

That's one of the most important things about Google: the motivation to make things better at a global scale. Creating a better browser, a better mail service, an ad service built around relevant ads, a translation service that constantly improves shows that Google cares a lot about finding the right answers to the important problems.

22 comments:

  1. Douglas Edwards spent six years in the Googleplex as Google's first brand manager, and I'm Feeling Lucky is a rare insider's account of the company's birth pangs and its early years. He can personally vouch for the goodies. “The office was so much more ...

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  2. Anyone who wants a peek behind the sleek user interfaces and the cute holiday logos should read Douglas Edwards's “I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59.'' It's a detailed history of a key period in the company's growth and a ...

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  3. The intellectuals used to talk about Fordism, then post-Fordism. But surely they will have to start talking about Googlism. The more you realise the length of Google's ten-year journey - from scrappy, sweet-chewing start-up to dictionary verb and ...

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  4. Feeling lucky tonight? The Mega Millions winning numbers for July 22, 2011, are worth a whopping $53000000—that's if you match all six Mega Millions numbers! Friday's lottery drawing is paying out a bundle! After going five drawings without a jackpot ...

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  5. "I'm Feeling Lucky" Douglas Edwards, Houghton Mifflin; $27 1. "Aftershock" Robert Reich, Random House/Gol den; $14.952. "How to Win Friends & Influence People" Dale Carnegie, Simon & Schuster; $153. "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" Stephen Covey, ...

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  6. he's met incredible people that he would have never had the chance to interact with, thanks to Hangouts. Klein says the trick is to "get lucky" in terms of who you'll meet. Sounds like the Hangout can give Google's old "I'm feeling lucky" new meaning.

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  7. n our first test on Evan's PC it ran Arma 2 – which, let's face it, he was gonna do anyway – but this is a great way to make sure that none of your games feel neglected. Download it here, give it a shot, and let us know what it runs in the comments!

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  8. Edwards committed his memories to print in “I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59,” a 432-page book released this month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. “There was never a day I was bored at work,” Edwards said in a telephone ...

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  9. n this excerpt from his new book, "I'm Feeling Lucky," Mr. Edwards gives an inside view of the company's early days, starting with his job interview with co-founder Sergey Brin, then 26 years old. Cindy McCaffrey, director of public relations, ...

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  10. Read I'm Feeling Lucky by Douglas Edwards and see what goes on behind the screens at an iconic online-based corporation. Doug Edwards desperately wanted to work for a tech company. It was 1999, he'd been watching the tech revolution as it bloomed, ...

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  11. Jewel: Pregnancy Is a Privilege I'm Enjoying
    People Magazine - ‎Jul 7, 2011‎
    And, she adds, despite its drawbacks, “Pregnancy is a privilege, and I feel lucky that I get to do it. It's kind of sad that men don't.” Jewel, host of Bravo's music competition show Platinum Hit, also reveals she has a healthy attitude towards weight ...

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  12. n an effort to stay on top, Search Engine Land reports Google recently began testing a new search page layout which is missing a key long-time feature: The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button was first introduced several ...

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  13. BOSTON -- Terry Francona has often said he's been lucky to manage the Red Sox, a post he's held since 2004. Had Dave Roberts not swiped a pivotal base in the 2004 American League Championship Series, Francona said, Boston would probably have a ...

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  14. I have a battered, torn and stained copy of his Roast Chicken and Other Stories at home, so I'm looking forward to watching that. By the way the reason I'm feeling as flat and lifeless as a Kumar bouncer today is that I spent yesterday with getting a ...

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  15. "I'm lucky enough to have a couple teammates here with me so it's great," Vandersloot said. "Especially because a lot of these girls know each other really well from USA Basketball or just playing together for a while so it's nice to have a teammate, ...

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  16. And racetracks, for gamblers feeling lucky, are taking bets once again. The downside to Minnesota's government reopening, which creaked to a start in earnest Thursday: No significant progress was made on the state's massive budget woes, ...

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  17. Google days memoir, “I'm Feeling Lucky,” in the Wall Street Journal. [WSJ] MySpace Founder: Is Social in Google's DNA? Tom Anderson thinks that users—not algorithms–should have ultimate control over filtering Google+ ...

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  18. Aching, hungover and feeling lucky not to be lying dead of heat exhaustion on the unfinished floors of Mortville, my crew and I made it back to Union Park Sunday in time to catch everyone's favorite contemporary Philadelphia freak-folkie Kurt Vile and ...

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  19. “Minnesotans who are feeling lucky can buy state lottery tickets .” For many, the service most missed during the shutdown was the issuing of drivers licenses and permits. This was especially true of young people seeking their first permits to drive. ...

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  20. In an excerpt from his new book, "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59," in this Saturday's Review, Douglas Edwards recounts tales from the early days of Google, including bluffing his way through a job interview with Sergey ...

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  21. In the new book, “I'm Feeling Lucky” by a former Google Brand Manager, Douglas Edwards tells of his concern at first sight of Google's notoriously luxurious employee benefits. He remembers, “A warning light flashed in my head at that. ...

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  22. Montreal Man

    “I feel good, I'm not nervous at all,” he says, adding that the excitement comes from seeing his whole family in the crowd. “They're all going to be there. They're going to fill the whole synagogue up. “I feel wonderful about it,” he adds. “How lucky I ...

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