In the Plex: a Closer Look at Google
Posted: March 11, 2012 Filed under: search Leave a comment »
After finishing Douglas Edwards’s I’m Feeling Lucky, I continued my reading about Google with Steven Levy’s In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. In the Plex is longer and more in-depth than I’m Feeling Lucky, and the tone is more critical. Where Edwards focused on the early years, culminating in Google’s triumphant initial public offering in 2004, Levy’s book takes Google up to the present day, describing conflicts with privacy advocates, anti-trust investigations, the moral grey area of Google’s operations in China, and the challenges of sustaining a culture of innovation in a large corporation.
Levy benefited from an unusual degree of access, including interviews with hundreds of Google employees and opportunities to attend internal meetings over a two-year period. The best parts of the book reveal exactly what the subtitle promises: how Google thinks and works.
Google’s look and feel
I was intrigued by an anecdote about Google’s longtime UI designer Marissa Mayer critiquing a product redesign. Trying to explain why she didn’t like the design, she summed up the essence of Google’s style: “It looks like a human was involved in choosing what went where… It looks too editorialized. Google products are machine-driven. They’re created by machines. And that is what makes us powerful. That’s what makes our products great.” Google’s look and feel are intended to convey the neutral efficiency of the products; its design is shaped by data and testing, not by any individual’s aesthetic or agenda.
(I can’t help wondering, though, if the latest redesign still reflects Mayer’s philosophy. It includes some elements where style seems to have trumped functionality – such as the elegant but somewhat confusing Gmail toolbar icons.)
Monoculture
Having some experience in an organization with a homogeneous workforce, I was interested to learn that while Google’s famously stringent hiring process has filled the company with brilliant, talented people, it has also contributed to the formation of a corporate monoculture that’s sometimes out-of-step with society at large:
“From the beginning, Google profiled people by which college they had attended. As [Larry] Page said, ‘We hired people like us’ – brainy strivers from privileged backgrounds who aced the SAT, brought home good grades and wrote the essays that got them into the best schools… There were exceptions but not enough to stop some Googlers from worrying that the workforce would take on an inbred aspect. ‘You’re going to get groupthink,’ warned Doug Edwards, an early marketing hire. ‘Everybody’s going to have the same background, the same opinions. You need to mix it up.’”
A lack of diverse viewpoints within the company may help explain Google’s missteps in social networking. Google is known for its commitment to “dogfooding” new products. (From the expression “eat your own dogfood,” the practice dictates that software developers use the products they are building.) But when Google Buzz was released in 2010, it quickly became apparent that internal testing had failed to identify a major problem – that users would feel their privacy had been violated when Buzz automatically created a network based on their email contacts. Levy writes:
“Google had made a critical error. Its employees differed from the general population… Nicole Wong, the lawyer in charge of Google’s policy operations, later admitted the mistake. ‘The on-boarding [dogfood] process is not like doing it in the wild, and the social network of 20,000 Googlers is not like being on the Internet. That process failed us.’”
Management
You wouldn’t think Google would have much in common with Bell Canada, so I was surprised to learn that in 2008 Larry Page recruited Bell’s Patrick Pichette as Google’s new CFO. What could Pichette, who had been forcing through some tough cost-cutting in labour negotiations with Bell’s unionized workers, have to offer Google, a company famous for granting its employees lavish perks like free food and massages? It turns out that several years of rapid growth and aggressive hiring had left Google ill-equipped to effectively manage its workforce:
“Oddly, whereas Google had built its data infrastructure to reroute around failure, it had no human infrastructure to deal with failed projects. ‘We didn’t know which ones they were, because we never paused to ask ourselves that question,’ says Pichette.
The array of different Google products in beta at any given time – some of them overlapping or competing with each other – seems to bear out this observation.
Google and government
The last chapter of “In the Plex” describes Google’s relations with the U.S. government, and includes a section about several Google employees who were inspired by Barack Obama’s election to leave Google to work in Washington, D.C. with the starry-eyed goal of using technology and Google-esque efficiency and innovation to improve government. As someone who works in government, I found much to identify with:
“[W]hen the outsiders…hit the nation’s capital, they went straight into a buzz saw of illogic, bad intentions, mistrust, and, worst of all, obsolete gadgets. Not only were they chained to outdated Windows computers, but they were denied the Internet tools they had come to rely on as much as breathing. Rules dictated that there could be no Facebook, no Google Talk, no Gmail, no Twitter, no Skype.”
Katie Stanton, one of the former Googlers, lamented: “Working in government is like running a marathon. Blindfolded. Wearing sandbags.” The truth of that statement sums up why I remain so fascinated with Google: despite its problems, Google still seems to represent a better way of working and a model for those of us who would like to leave our blindfolds and sandbags behind.
Branding and marketing the Google way: insights from “I’m Feeling Lucky” by Douglas Edwards
Posted: January 7, 2012 Filed under: content, marketing, search 1 Comment »
Douglas Edwards was employee number 59 at Google, hired in 1999 when the search company was still in start-up mode. His book, I’m Feeling Lucky: the Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, covers the most dramatic years of Google’s growth from the perspective of someone who was both an insider and yet, oddly, also an outsider within the company. Edwards was a marketing guy in an organization where engineers and computer scientists rule. Established branding and marketing practices were just one more thing Google’s founders thought they could set aside or reinvent as part of their ambitious drive to create a truly new and different kind of business.
Early on, Edwards discovered how much disdain Larry Page and Sergey Brin had for banner ads, busy portal-style landing pages, and especially the lavish Super Bowl TV ads that had become a badge of success for many dot-com companies. An early lesson came when Sergey suggested, in all seriousness, “Why don’t we take the marketing budget and use it to inoculate Chechen refugees against cholera. It will help our brand awareness and we’ll get more new people to use Google.” While the Chechen refugee idea didn’t turn out to be practicable, Sergey’s larger point was clear: his proposal was no less valid than any other branding strategy because marketing is unscientific – and Google wasn’t interested in spending money on anything that couldn’t demonstrate measurable results.
With the perspective of hindsight, Google’s triumph over other search engines seems inevitable, but at the time Edwards joined the company, Inktomi and AltaVista were the giants of search, and Ask Jeeves looked like a strong contender just because its brand was so well-defined. One great anecdote in the book involves Edwards trying to explain the value of branding to Google’s founders: “In a world where all search engines are equal, we’ll need to rely on branding to differentiate us from everyone else,” he told them. Larry Page’s answer speaks volumes: “If we can’t win on quality, we shouldn’t win at all.”
Edwards got the message, and went on to draft some guiding principles for the Google brand strategy:
- PR and word of mouth work better than ads.
- Paid ads work against our brand. Focus on the “joy of discovery.”
- We’ll grow faster getting current users to search more than by mass marketing.
- All our promotions must include a way to measure success.
- Product interaction is, and must remain, the primary branding experience.
- User retention efforts should center on improving UI and user support.
In other words: the user experience is the brand.
Edwards found that one significant way he could contribute was through copy-writing. He developed what he came to think of as “the Google voice”:
Douglas Edwards
“I began writing copy for the site as if the person reading it were a friend. I added Simpsons references to our FAQs, made puns in our newsletter, and, after engineer Amit Patel confessed a love of prosimians and their googley eyes, started including lemurs in all my examples. (“I don’t want anyone to know I’m into lemur racing. Is my information private?”) It made my job a lot more fun, but also made it clear that an actual human being had touched the page the user was reading.”
He also helped formulate an important position on product naming and branding: “Do you give a product a new name that suggests it’s completely separate from your core business? Do you incorporate your primary brand name to show that it’s equal to, but distinct from, your existing product? Or do you simply use a generic term to describe it so that it becomes just another service you offer, rather than a distinct product that stands alone?” The decision was to put all brand equity in the Google name – a strategy that Google has followed fairly consistently, with the introduction of major services (Google News, Google Image Search, Google Maps) under the overarching Google brand rather than as stand-alone products. As Edwards saw early on, this approach “adds credibility to new services and ensures that all achievements accrue to the benefit of the Google brand.” Instances where Google has tried to create stand-alone brands (Froogle, Orkut) only seem to prove the value of sticking to the overarching brand strategy.
I’m Feeling Lucky is a likeable book, in large part because Edwards is humble and humorous about being odd man out as a forty-something arts major in a data-driven company dominated by brilliant young engineers. With admirable honesty, he recounts stories from the early days, when his traditional thinking about branding turned out to be completely wrong. (E.g., he initially opposed the idea of Google Doodles because tampering with your logo violated every orthodox idea about branding at the time.) And he throws in a few delighters, including the glossary at the end of the book, where you’ll find definitions such as:
Nontrivial: A euphemism for “impossible.” Since engineers are not going to admit anything is impossible, they use this word instead. When an engineer says something is “nontrivial,” it’s the equivalent of an airline pilot calmly saying you may encounter “just a bit of turbulence” as he flies you into a Category 5 hurricane.
Search patterns: tangible futures for discovery (Peter Morville)
Posted: March 14, 2010 Filed under: design, search, user experience | Tags: design, search, user experience Leave a comment »Peter is a librarian (!) turned information architect.
“The single biggest opportunity to make positive change is through search.” The return on investment can be significant – higher sales, lowered reliance on customer support.
A search system includes content creators, metadata and indexing, tools (algorithms), interfaces, and end-user psychology and behaviour.
In mobile search, we nudge people towards browsing – many mobile applications are so new that people don’t know what to search for. We have to help them understand what’s possible.
Search is a hybrid of design, engineering, and marketing. There are complex interdependencies and changing requirements. It’s a problme that is never solved. It’s a project and a process that never ends.
Beyond usable: accessible, useful, desirable, findable, credible, valuable.
Morville created the search patterns library in Flickr. Patterns include narrowing, expanding, thrashing (when people modify their searches over and over again, trying to get good results).
Auto-complete: why wait for the results interface to start helping users? Suggest options as soon as they start typing.
“Best first” is the most important search pattern – the most relevant results must be at the top.
Speed is critical – that’s why Google has invested in performance and still displays the time it took to do your search at top right. Search must be fast.
Social data helps inform relevance ranking. (Our number of copies ranking works like this. Example of Books & Authors, where this doesn’t work.)
Mentions challenge for libraries of exposing licensed databases. How do we design an experience that doesn’t rely too much on where the data comes from?
Faceted search: facets serve as a custom map to search results that helps users understand what they’ve found. It also clarifies the options for next steps.
NCSU is using Summon in beta to integrate federated search of their databases.
Amazon iPhone app – good example of faceted searching presented in a mobile interface.
Amazon gives you limited facets with initial search results, richer facets once you begin to refine.
Attention to detail and continuous incremental improvement contribute to a great search experience.
iPhone apps already let you search by sound (song recognition) or search for things that look like an image. Input from users does not have to be verbal.
