How Google Works

by Eric Schmidt

One Friday afternoon in May 2002, Larry Page was playing around on the Google site, typing in search terms and seeing what sort of results and ads he’d get back. He wasn’t happy with what he saw. He would enter a query for one thing, and while Google came back with plenty of relevant organic results, some of the ads were completely unrelated to the search.22 A search for something like “Kawasaki H1B” would yield lots of ads for lawyers offering to help immigrants get H-1B US visas, but none related to the vintage motorcycle to which the search query referred. Or a search for “french cave paintings” delivered ads that said “buy french cave paintings at …,” with the name of an online retailer that obviously did not stock French cave paintings (or even facsimiles of them). Larry was horrified that the AdWords engine, which figured out which ads worked best with which queries, was occasionally subjecting our users to such useless messages. At that point, Eric still thought Google was a fairly normal start-up. But what happened over the next seventy-two hours completely shifted that perception. In a normal company, the CEO, seeing a bad product, would call the person in charge of the product. There would be a meeting or two or three to discuss the problem, review potential solutions, and decide on a course of action. A plan would come together to implement the solution. Then, after a fair amount of quality assurance testing, the solution would launch. In a normal company, this ...