A NATION OF VOYEURS I (Boston Sunday Globe, Feruary 2, 2003)
Author(s):NeilSwideyDate:February 2, 2003Page: 10 Section: Magazine
Michael is a clean-cut 34-year-old working in a professional job at a Boston medical school. You'd never know he did time for burglary and is a former drug addict. Well, actually, you would if you Googled him. Go to the Google.com home page and type in Michael's name (for obvious reasons, we are not including his last name here). That simple step produces more than 100 links to documents written by and about Michael. The search, Google proudly notes, takes just a 10th of a second.
Michael has never hidden from his past, and in his 20s, he even wrote for a few specialized publications about his brief stint behind bars as a 17-year-old. He was happy to share his exploits with that sliver of the population genuinely interested in the issues of incarceration. But Michael never saw Google coming - how those tiny publications would go online and into the claws of the nation's top Internet search engine, and how a bored co-worker or prospective employer would be able to get up close and personal with Michael's wild ride as a teenager.
Dazzlingly fast, vast, and precise, Google has made our lives appreciably easier. The first tool truly to make sense of the white noise that is the Internet, Google has become essential research for everyone from sales people calling on new accounts to single people taking another spin with blind-date roulette. It's reconnected long-lost biological brothers and battalion buddies. And who dials 411 anymore, when it's cheaper and faster on Google, and you don't have to explain to some headset-wearer in Terre Haute how to spell Worcester? Google saves time, saves face - it may even save lives. Instead of calling their doctor, some people type their symptoms into Google; a few have learned they were in the early stages of a heart attack. But somewhere along the path toward changing our daily lives, Google changed our concept of time as well. It has helped make our past - or oddly refracted shards of it - present and permanent. That's a radical notion for a medium usually defined by its ability to constantly update itself.
You don't have to have a rap sheet from deep in your past to be affected by the long arm of Google's Web crawler. Maybe it was a stupid fraternity prank or a careless posting to an Internet newsgroup in college. Perhaps you once went on a rant at a selectmen's meeting or signed a petition without stopping to read it. Or maybe you endured a bitter divorce. You may think those chapters are closed. Google begs to differ.
While most of your embarrassing baggage was already available to the public, it was effectively off-limits to everyone but the professionally intrepid or supremely nosy. Now, in states where court records have gone online, and thanks to the one-click ease of Google, you can read all the sordid details of your neighbor's divorce with no more effort than it takes to check your e-mail.
"It's the collapse of inconvenience," says Siva Vaidhyanathan, assistant professor of culture and communication at New YorkUniversity. "It turns out inconvenience was a really important part of our lives, and we didn't realize it."
Google has quietly but unmistakably changed our expectations about what we can know about one another. But this search engine that fields 150 million queries a day is of no use in helping us determine how much information we deserve to know about one another, or how we should proceed once we know it. Should we confront friends, dates, or co-workers with the damning details we unearthed while cyber-snooping? Or should we say nothing?
Michael has felt it both ways. He first learned about the new Web order in 1999, early on in Google's life, when a woman he had just begun dating confronted him about his prison past. "Why didn't you tell me about this?" she demanded to know. The question exposed a new double standard. "When you meet someone," Michael says, "you don't say, `I had an affair one time,' or `I was arrested for DUI once,' or `I cheated on my taxes in 1984.' " Since then, there have been other confrontations, but what Michael finds most disturbing are the sudden silences. "Instead of thinking, `Was I curt last week?' or `Did I insult this political party or that belief?' I have to think about what happened when I was 17."
When he was searching for an apartment, Michael met with no fewer than 30 potential housemates and never got so much as a callback. Once, as a finalist for a job, he was courted aggressively through three rounds of interviews and a host of phone and e-mail contacts. Then, suddenly, they stopped phoning or taking his calls. His hunch: Someone Googled him. But the worst part is, he'll never know. "If someone asks you about your past, that means they are willing to consider what you have to say about it," Michael says. "But if they don't ask, that means they've made up their minds."
Yet he finds it hard to blame Google. Asked if he uses the search engine himself, he smiles and says: "All the time."
LIKE EVERY SILICON VALLEY STORY worth remembering, this one begins in a garage. Actually, it begins in the computer science department at StanfordUniversity, but that's so much less compatible with the demands of dot-com lore. In 1995, Sergey Brin, a native of Moscow, and LarryPage, a native of Michigan, met as students in Stanford's PhD computer science program. They began tinkering with search-engine technology, focusing on how Web pages link to one another. By 1998, that work led them to found Google, with the help of nearly $1 million collected from friends, family, and a couple of Valley investors. That same year, with their new search engine online, they moved the operation out of their Stanford dorm rooms and into the garage (and three bedrooms and two baths) of a five-bedroom house their friend Susan Wojcicki had just bought in Menlo Park.
She wanted them to pay her $1,500 a month in rent and give her a piece of their new company. They were smart enough to offer her a straight $1,700, with no equity. She didn't fight too hard. Although Brin and Page were as brash and confident then as they are now, telling her, " `We're going to take over the Net,' " Wojcicki says, "I didn't take them seriously. Inktomi [the search engine powerhouse at the time] was worth like $20 billion, and these guys were renting out my garage." They were fairly good tenants, though she occasionally found herself having to bang out e-mails - "Googlers, you need to clean up!" - and was a little freaked out when their intimate holiday gathering grew to a 400-person guest list.
In the beginning, Google - which takes its name from "googol," the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros - was a hit mostly in techie circles. Brin and Page began building a staff; CraigSilverstein, a classmate from Stanford, was the first on board. "Google's first hire" is how he's still known around the company, even though his official title is director of technology. Wojcicki eventually began working for her tenants and is now director of product management, though most people still think of her as Sergey and Larry's former landlord.
Anyone who is anyone at Google, it seems, has a similar handle, a shorthand identifier that stresses the company's institutionalized quirkiness - from the former neurosurgeon who now operates Google's vast computer network to the former chief of staff for then-US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers who now oversees one of the company's revenue streams to the former personal chef to the Grateful Dead who now dishes out organic grub in the Google cafe.
In just a couple of years, the operation has blown past its garage-band days. An infusion of $25 million from two high-powered venture capitalist firms in 1999 put it on solid footing. A contract signed the following year to provide additional search results for Yahoo! gave Google instant credibility, revenue, and exposure. The company's reputation has grown virally ever since. (Even AOL signed up Google to power its search engine last year. Yahoo Inc., while still a client, is so nervous about Google's growth that it launched a bid in December for Inktomi.)
Google now occupies three tan buildings spread across a bland office park in Mountain View, California, which is about 10 miles northwest of San Jose. The company has had to erect a heated tent and mobile kitchen to relieve the cafeteria congestion. It has more than 600 employees in 15 locations worldwide. It offers search results in 36 languages, and half its traffic comes from outside the United States.
To walk through the "Googleplex" headquarters is to step back in Silicon Valley time. While most other dot-coms have gone bust or are in full retreat, Google is living like it's 1999. All the discredited accouterments associated with the dot-com era are still on defiant display. There's the pool table (with dry-erase board hanging nearby, in case workers get inspired midgame); the lobby featuring a baby grand piano, 1980s-style arcade games, and constellation of lava lamps; the twice-weekly staff hockey games; the on-staff masseuse; the brightly colored exercise balls that serve as extra seating for impromptu meetings; the mountain bikes and unicycles that clog the hallways (and the cramped office that the founders still share); the massive wall chart documenting the company's growth that was drawn entirely with a 64-pack of Crayolas and annotated with milestones like "Nov. 1999: Angie starts!"; and, of course, the free lunch and dinner - all-organic, all-gourmet. Brin is all of 29, his fellow founder Page is 30, and they look almost wizened next to the rest of this ultrayoung staff.
There is a palpable culture to the place that occasionally borders on the cultlike. Almost every employee I talked to, for instance, shared the conversational tic of ending sentences with an octave-climbing "right?" as if waiting for my buy-in. Many began their responses to questions with an extra slow "So-o-o," as if to say: "I'm going to make this simple for you." Employees tend to quote the founders liberally, saying things like, "As Sergey said at our holiday party, we have to think about Google's impact on the world . . ." or "As Larry and Sergey say, our goal is to organize the world's information!"
Still, there's an overall current of fun and innovation flowing through the place. And there is ample evidence of the profound impact the company is having on the rest of us. In the lobby, behind the free juice bar that doubles as a receptionist's desk, a screen displays a constant scroll of search words being typed into Google somewhere in the world at that time. As I looked up at the screen, I saw: Adult education Ontario; David Blaine; wrap around tummy tuck; Forta Patchie (honest); Oakland Fire Dept; Barbara Hershey (perhaps typed in by the actress herself, hoping to find out where her glory days went?); stinger amplifier kits; Dennis Franz salary; and a host of Asian search words I could not decipher. But Google's computers would be able to make sense of them.
Humans are hardly involved in the actual searching or sorting. That's done by more than 10,000 servers, which in Google's case are cheap PCs loaded with memory and sitting in tall racks in several high-security data storage facilities around the country. Speed and relevance have always been the hallmarks of Google's approach. All these computers help keep search times below half a second, but so, too, has the founders' refusal to accept ads with images, which would slow the process.
Google quickly distinguished itself from other search engines with its rapid responses, its refusal to let paid advertisers pervert the integrity of a search (advertisers are labeled "sponsored links" and cordoned off), and its uncanny ability to know just what you're looking for. As a measure of the founders' confidence - or cockiness - in their search algorithm, they designed an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button: Type in your search words and hit that option, and Google takes you directly to the Web site it believes you're looking for.
The Google search technology is based on something called PageRank (named after Larry Page), which determines relevance not only by counting the times a search word appears in a particular Web page but also by factoring in how many other pages are linked to that page as well as their general reputation. Google's sophisticated approach, combined with its crawler's insatiable appetite for uncovering new corners of the Web, simply works better. That has propelled its meteoric rise.
Ask people in the industry how Google was able to outdistance the competition, and they say the same thing: focus. While other Web sites tried to be all things to all people in an effort to get profitable, Google stubbornly concentrated on just building the world's best search engine. By the end of 2001, Google not only had reached its goal, but, surprisingly, it had managed to find profitability along the way. Many analysts expect Google to go public when the market's distrust of dot-coms begins to dissolve. Google embodies the original ethos of the Web - free, fast, and democratic.
But will success lead to its undoing? In the last year, Google - whose youthful founders eventually relented and brought in an adult CEO - has introduced new sites focused on news and shopping (froogle.com). In other words, it's looking a lot more like an all-things-to-everyone portal and less like simply the world's best search engine.
AMANDA HAD BEEN DATING HIM FOR about a month. She liked his laid-back style, dug his shaved-head approach to male pattern baldness. Then, late one night, she received an e-mail from him containing a few angry words and a link to a short story she had written for an obscure online zine.
Amanda, a 26-year-old graphic artist who lived in Providence before moving west, had published the story under her real name, confident that only fiction aficionados would go to the trouble of finding the site. "Gee, thanks, Google," she says now.
She and her new beau had met online, and this particular story that he had found by Googling her revolves around a young woman who - surprise - meets a guy online. Everything goes well until he neglects to call her back a few times, and she quickly turns into an obsessive, spurned girlfriend of near-Fatal Attraction dimensions. "It was fiction," Amanda says, but the guy thought otherwise. She admits, "If you assumed it was me, it would make you freak out, but you should stop and ask."
Amanda decided it was pointless to argue with him. "By the time somebody's convinced you're obsessive," she says, "trying to convince him otherwise is only going to make you look more obsessive." But the more Amanda thought about it, the more steamed she got. "The hypocrisy of it all - you think I'm an obsessive person? Well, you're the one Googling me!"
So she opted for Google revenge. Amanda created an alternate digital identity for her former boyfriend - a personal Web page that would, in all likelihood, be accessed only by those people Googling him by name. On this over-the-top Web page, the guy makes a series of mock confessions that, if taken seriously, would be toxic in any future dating situation. He "admits" to being untrustworthy, jobless, sneaky, a lousy lover, and, finally, a carrier of venereal disease. Hey, Mom, let me tell you a little bit about my new boyfriend.
The cases of payback can be even worse. According to Web lore, a Midwestern college student named LibbyHoeler once sent her boyfriend a video postcard of her doing a striptease to a suggestive soundtrack of MarvinGaye and the Divinyls. As the story goes, she eventually cheated on him; to get back at her, he shared her private peep show with the Internet masses; Libby was so embarrassed that she ended up having to drop out of school. Who knows if any of these details are true? It's not even clear that LibbyHoeler (or Hoeller) is her real name. God help her if it is, for the shadow of this performance will follow her for the rest of her life. Today, there are entire Web sites devoted to Libby, attracting disturbingly animated fans proffering marriage proposals and sharing random details about her that they gleaned from Google searches. And, naturally, there are now a host of porn sites peddling full-length footage of the dorm-room dance.
Most young single people confess to Googling their prospective dates, but there are no societal norms yet on what to do with the harvested information. If a Google search reveals that you and your blind date share an appreciation for Veruca Salt or Bavarian poetry or Leonard Nimoy's aborted attempt at a singing career, how can you bring that up gracefully, without making your snooping obvious?