In the beginning...
The memory of my first encounter with Google is seared into my memory like JFK's assassination is supposed to be seared into the minds of many baby boomers.
As an aside, It's always seemed odd to me that the baby boom generation is supposed to include anyone born through 1964. Technically I'm a boomer, but JFK was long dead when I entered first grade. On the other hand, I do clearly remember what the world was like before there was Google, before there was the World Wide Web, and even before there were personal computers. I am a member of the last generation to know what that world was like. God, do I feel old now.
But I digress.
I was reading a usenet newsgroup (I'll tell you which one later -- it bears on a peculiar personality trait of mine that has some bearing on my Google experience later on) when someone answered a particularly obscure question and followed up with "Thank God for Google" or some such comment. (When Google acquired Deja and brought their database of old usenet postings on line I went looking for the post that started the whole thing and couldn't find it. This was just the first of many Twilight-Zonish (or X-Filesish for you younger readers) events that happened to me of the course of the next few years.)
Google? What's Google, I wondered. So I pulled up a web browser and took a wild guess (which was as good a way as any of finding things on the web in those days): www.google.com. Oh, it's a search engine, kind of like Alta Vista. But, holy shit, it's fast! And it has this uncanny way of putting just what you're looking for right at the top of the results list.
To understand what happened next I have to give you a little background about my professional life up to that point. I had moved to California from Virginia in 1988 along with my Ph.D. thesis advisor, David Miller, who had just been offered a job at JPL to do research for the Mars Rover program. Over the course of the next twelve years my career had a lot of ups and downs, and I had a lot of opportunities to leave JPL, but somehow the opportunities always seemed to come along at the "up" times when life seemed good and I wasn't much inclined to rip up my roots, which were growing deeper as the years went by.
But the day I found Google just happened to be during a "down" time.
My first thought was, "How the hell do they do that?" Alta Vista was astonishing enough in its day, but this took speed and accuracy to a whole new level. I had always been idly curious about how Alta Vista worked, and now I just had to know. In a fit of what Alan Greenspan would have called "irrational exuberance", I dashed off a resume.
Google got back to me with astonishing speed. It was early 2000, the dotcom bubble was just reaching its peak, it was a seller's market when it came to any kind of technical talent, and I looked pretty good on paper. If memory serves, it was only about two or three hours before my phone rang. A week later I was flying up for an interview.
I don't have nearly as many colorful interview stories to tell as Doug did. I met with half a dozen people. (Neither Larry nor Sergey interviewed me.) They grilled me on the usual things -- caches, hash tables, virtual functions, etc. It was a pretty standard technical interview as best I can recall, with a few Googley twists (how would you write a program that could identify news sites on the web?) I guess I must have hornswoggled them pretty good because they made me an offer. (That may sound like a bit of self-deprecating humor, but it isn't. The truth is I really wasn't qualified for the job. But that didn't become apparent until later.)
So now I'm in a pickle. On the one hand I've got this job offer and an opportunity to learn how this cool technology works, and maybe even make a few bucks on the stock options (though that was never the main motivation for going. It was pretty clear even in early 2000 that the internet bubble was gong to burst sooner or later, and besides, how was a search engine ever going to make money?) More to the point, I was worried that if I didn't get away from JPL now I never would, and I didn't really want to retire without ever having experienced anything but working for one organization.
On the other hand, I had a pretty cushy situation. My seniority at JPL made it possible for me to work on pretty much anything I wanted to. I was well paid (by my standards at the time). My job was (or seemed) secure. My wife and I had just bought a nice new house and gotten a dog and a cat. (The Southern California real estate market was just starting to pull out of a slump and we were able to buy for what now seems dirt cheap.) To take this job we would either have to move or I would be doing the commute from hell. Neither of those prospects seemed very appealing.
I made my decision while visiting some friends in upstate New York. One of my friends had just had her father die unexpectedly. He was an orthopedic surgeon. Very wealthy, or so it seemed to me at the time. Full of life. Commuted from his farm in Virginia to his job in his own Bell Jet Ranger. (I remember he flew in one night while I was visiting my friend on the farm. He was a real regular down-to-earth guy. Asked me if I'd like to join him tomorrow -- he was going to the Pittsburg Steeler's summer training camp. I'm not that much of a football fan, but it was pretty damn cool anyway. There were fans everywhere wondering who the hell we were that we got to go into all the VIP areas.)
One day he just keeled over while skiing. Heart attack. He was dead before they got him off the mountain.
It was during that reunion that I had an epiphany: life is short, and I had everything I ever wanted: a nice house, a secure job that I (mostly) enjoyed, why in the world would I want to put myself through hell just to hang out at some dotcom that would probably be bankrupt in a year or two?
When we got back from New York I called Google and told them that I had decided to decline their offer.
As an aside, It's always seemed odd to me that the baby boom generation is supposed to include anyone born through 1964. Technically I'm a boomer, but JFK was long dead when I entered first grade. On the other hand, I do clearly remember what the world was like before there was Google, before there was the World Wide Web, and even before there were personal computers. I am a member of the last generation to know what that world was like. God, do I feel old now.
But I digress.
I was reading a usenet newsgroup (I'll tell you which one later -- it bears on a peculiar personality trait of mine that has some bearing on my Google experience later on) when someone answered a particularly obscure question and followed up with "Thank God for Google" or some such comment. (When Google acquired Deja and brought their database of old usenet postings on line I went looking for the post that started the whole thing and couldn't find it. This was just the first of many Twilight-Zonish (or X-Filesish for you younger readers) events that happened to me of the course of the next few years.)
Google? What's Google, I wondered. So I pulled up a web browser and took a wild guess (which was as good a way as any of finding things on the web in those days): www.google.com. Oh, it's a search engine, kind of like Alta Vista. But, holy shit, it's fast! And it has this uncanny way of putting just what you're looking for right at the top of the results list.
To understand what happened next I have to give you a little background about my professional life up to that point. I had moved to California from Virginia in 1988 along with my Ph.D. thesis advisor, David Miller, who had just been offered a job at JPL to do research for the Mars Rover program. Over the course of the next twelve years my career had a lot of ups and downs, and I had a lot of opportunities to leave JPL, but somehow the opportunities always seemed to come along at the "up" times when life seemed good and I wasn't much inclined to rip up my roots, which were growing deeper as the years went by.
But the day I found Google just happened to be during a "down" time.
My first thought was, "How the hell do they do that?" Alta Vista was astonishing enough in its day, but this took speed and accuracy to a whole new level. I had always been idly curious about how Alta Vista worked, and now I just had to know. In a fit of what Alan Greenspan would have called "irrational exuberance", I dashed off a resume.
Google got back to me with astonishing speed. It was early 2000, the dotcom bubble was just reaching its peak, it was a seller's market when it came to any kind of technical talent, and I looked pretty good on paper. If memory serves, it was only about two or three hours before my phone rang. A week later I was flying up for an interview.
I don't have nearly as many colorful interview stories to tell as Doug did. I met with half a dozen people. (Neither Larry nor Sergey interviewed me.) They grilled me on the usual things -- caches, hash tables, virtual functions, etc. It was a pretty standard technical interview as best I can recall, with a few Googley twists (how would you write a program that could identify news sites on the web?) I guess I must have hornswoggled them pretty good because they made me an offer. (That may sound like a bit of self-deprecating humor, but it isn't. The truth is I really wasn't qualified for the job. But that didn't become apparent until later.)
So now I'm in a pickle. On the one hand I've got this job offer and an opportunity to learn how this cool technology works, and maybe even make a few bucks on the stock options (though that was never the main motivation for going. It was pretty clear even in early 2000 that the internet bubble was gong to burst sooner or later, and besides, how was a search engine ever going to make money?) More to the point, I was worried that if I didn't get away from JPL now I never would, and I didn't really want to retire without ever having experienced anything but working for one organization.
On the other hand, I had a pretty cushy situation. My seniority at JPL made it possible for me to work on pretty much anything I wanted to. I was well paid (by my standards at the time). My job was (or seemed) secure. My wife and I had just bought a nice new house and gotten a dog and a cat. (The Southern California real estate market was just starting to pull out of a slump and we were able to buy for what now seems dirt cheap.) To take this job we would either have to move or I would be doing the commute from hell. Neither of those prospects seemed very appealing.
I made my decision while visiting some friends in upstate New York. One of my friends had just had her father die unexpectedly. He was an orthopedic surgeon. Very wealthy, or so it seemed to me at the time. Full of life. Commuted from his farm in Virginia to his job in his own Bell Jet Ranger. (I remember he flew in one night while I was visiting my friend on the farm. He was a real regular down-to-earth guy. Asked me if I'd like to join him tomorrow -- he was going to the Pittsburg Steeler's summer training camp. I'm not that much of a football fan, but it was pretty damn cool anyway. There were fans everywhere wondering who the hell we were that we got to go into all the VIP areas.)
One day he just keeled over while skiing. Heart attack. He was dead before they got him off the mountain.
It was during that reunion that I had an epiphany: life is short, and I had everything I ever wanted: a nice house, a secure job that I (mostly) enjoyed, why in the world would I want to put myself through hell just to hang out at some dotcom that would probably be bankrupt in a year or two?
When we got back from New York I called Google and told them that I had decided to decline their offer.
13 Comments:
Must have been a tricky decision. I wonder if knowing what you had known now, would you have still done the same thing?
I realise it is probably a faux pas to post here. But I wanted to mention what a wonderful piece of writing this is.
Good luck with whatever you choose to do in life.
Kindest Regards
Loughlan Burnett
Fascinating!
Hi. Please don't remove the anonymous option for posting comments -- it allows for more interesting people to feel comfortable posting. I see that you've already reserved the right to remove comments; I think that's just, but please do so sparingly. Just my HO.
Great blog, btw. The exaggerated lovefest that people have had with Google gets tiresome.
I'm kinda facing the exact same situation, though probably not at the same scale or level as you.
The thrill of working on something everyone uses excites me to no end. I've a pretty cushy job at the moment; pretty inconsequential, but cushy.
I wonder about family life should I decide to take on the new, more exciting job. Whether I should just coast, and whether I'll regret that I never took the plunge. That is the question.
Does anyone at Google ever stop to think that 99.99% of the company's revenue is the result of a cold hard reality-
The majority of websurfers out there don't have the experience to understand that those adsense ads or google search result ads aren't organic links?
There was a poll done by the BBC about 6 months ago that showed 68% of surfers were unable to point out what links on a page were ads and which were part of the content.
Banner ads had a huge clickthrough rate when they were introduced, then plummeted to almost nothing after a few years when even the newest of the newbies realized they were just advertisements. Text ads right now seem to be enjoying the same "novelty" in that plenty of people arent aware they are ads either.
Since almost every website using adsense matches the colors and fonts and background of the ad panel to look like the rest of the content, and google's engine puts ads that seem related to the rest of the text on the page, is it any surprise that the clickthrough rate is so high? 10 percent of Google's revenue comes from AOL users, who have a clickthrough rate that's more than 5x higher any other demographic on the net. That should tell you something.
Anyway, I guess my question is, how long until even the AOL crowd catches on and clickthroughs plummet?
Btw- why does it say ads by "Goooooooogle" ? Are you trying to be cute or is there some reason dealing with spiders that you want to be able to identify casual mention of Google from adsense ad mentions?
I'll let Ron address the issue of ad clickthroughs, though it seems pretty evident at this point that the difference between banners and Google ads is relevance to the user. While there's undoubtedly confusion in some instances about what's an ad and what is not, the utility of the ads is unmistakable.
I can also state without hesitation that I worked very closely with Google's partner team to ensure that search partners followed our guidelines for clearly identifying what was a sponsored link and what was a search result. I'll likely post about those wars in the future.
As to "Ads by Goooooogle," we needed a way to make Google ads unique and thus protectable under the law. This was not a universally beloved way of doing that, but it seemed to be the best of the options available.
I'll let Ron address the issue of ad clickthroughs
I'm not quite sure what I'm supposed to address here. At least two issues were raised: 1) the prediction that text ad clickthroughs are going to plummet the way banner ad clickthrough did, and 2) the possibility that people don't know that the ads are ads.
I don't have much to say about issue #2. The ads are pretty clearly labelled, but I will not dispute that there are some pretty dim bulbs out there.
As to issue #1 I'll defer to Carl Sagan who observed that prophecy is a lost art.
Turned 'em down? Heh. For exactly the same reasons, I stayed as far away from dotcoms as I could. Especially in 2000, when some of the stupider ventures had already disappeared.
I eventually interviewed at Google in 2004, but only after two friends of mine went, and I could grill them on whether or not it was really a place they liked to work. Since Google had just gone IPO, and the stock had shot from 85 to 120, I figured the easy money was already gone from stock options. But my career wasn't going anywhere at work, and I didn't have to move, so why not?
I still want to know what Google told you when you said no. For me in 1998, I told Microsoft no, and they responded with a better offer. Given the job market in 2000, I'm surprised that Google didn't do the same to you.
IMO, banner ad clickthroughs fell because they were (are) intrusive to the search engine user's experience. Intrusive ads seem to work on sites like ESPN (at least, I have not heard that they feel the need to abandon them). It would be interesting to learn what % of their regular users also use Google.
I think at some point the rate of "legitimate" clickthroughs will fall off (if it hasn't already) as the medium matures and users become more selective in their surfing and buying behavior.
I think the defining difference between Google ads and the more 'traditional' forms is utility, as Doug suggests. Google ads can be so darned interesting that you want to click on some, especially if you're searching hurriedly for product or services. I find myself scanning the page, then automatically scanning the Google ads alongside if I haven't found what I'm looking for. It's an interesting twist on the ad form.
"Some pretty dim bulbs"?
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/146/report_display.asp
WHAT IS THE CONTINUATION OF THE STORY?????
DID U WORK FOR GOOGLE OR NOT?
great piece of writing!
sorryabout your friend...
i'm wondering uif you could include some pieces of writing for your spanish-speaking fans... specially the ones from mexico, like me...
Kudos and good luck in life.
Post a Comment
<< Home