Tangled up in Google

Linton Chiswick

• Last Updated: February 07. 2009 9:30AM UAE / February 7. 2009 5:30AM GMT

Don’t be evil. According to Google Inc lore, it was a programmer who, in the summer of 2001, coined what would become the company’s corporate motto. Cool and casual, it encapsulated Silicon Valley’s unbuttoned, post-hippie business culture. But five years later, at buttoned-up Davos, Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, was explaining how his company had been forced to invent a more pragmatic “evil scale”.

The opportunity to serve the Chinese people had apparently justified the censorship Google agreed to implement on behalf of their government. Small evils were now okay, as long as they contributed to the greater good.

Google has always been a headline-grabber. In only the past fortnight: it has expanded into education, entering a partnership with Nasa and an unconventional academic to inaugurate a computer science-led futurology school; it has brought the net briefly to its knees with a bug that wrongly labelled every website as virus-infested; and it has launched a privacy-busting web tool that allows users to track their friends’ cellphone signals on a map. All this … while continuing to dominate online advertising sales.

A decade after its 1998 incorporation, the evil-fearing company behind the web’s most streamlined search engine is the tech world’s knottiest conundrum.

Google grew out of a Stanford University research project by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Backrub – its original name – looked at web search in a new way, promoting websites that were cited the most by other websites, rather than pages that simply contained the right words. Backrub was harder for content providers to dupe.

With its stripped-down, fast-loading page and its catchy in-joke name (a misspelling of Googol… one and one hundred zeros), Google had immediate geek-appeal. It took longer, however, to find a revenue stream. It was only when Page and Brin fully comprehended the lucrative relationship between search and advertising that the modern Google was born.

Not only is the search page the entry page to the web, every search reveals the interests and priorities of the person performing it. Imagine, speculated Page and Brin, if the results could be accompanied by carefully targeted, unobtrusively delivered advertisements.

Everybody would win. Users would find their information, plus a handful of potentially useful ads, without annoying pop-ups or irrelevant and slow-to-load banners.

Advertisers would reach exactly the right consumers. In 2000, Google established an automated payment system in which advertisers could set a maximum cost for advertising, and then settled back to watch the money roll in.

Everything Google has done since can be traced back in one form or another to this simple relationship between the information a user provides and the advertising a user receives.

This has paid for a host of innovations, from the Google Labs hothouse, to mapping and blogging. It has also proved an uneasy relationship, with a habit of throwing up unwelcome consequences.

From the moment in 2004 Google floated on the US stock market, earning an overnight capitalisation of US$23 billion (Dh84bn), the game had to change.

No longer a hobby run from a friend’s garage, Google had responsibilities to its shareholders, another layer of influence with more rigorous demands than a simple “Don’t be evil”.

Having established the link between personal data and revenue, Google wanted to know much more about all of us.

As the company rolled out a plethora of invaluable free services – web-based email, a web-based office and productivity suite, personalised homepages – and bought other membership-based websites, most notably, YouTube, it learnt more and more about you and me, and used that information to monetise these services with highly-targeted advertising.

The Gmail servers read our private Google e-mail so they know what advertisements to place among it. Our browsing habits are recorded, the contents of our web documents scanned.

Google points out that no human hand is involved, just a machine scanning for matching keywords, and that if we want our web to provide a personal experience, to understand the subtleties of our search requests and take us quickly to the information we seek, it’s going to need to learn our habits first.

Nevertheless, a significant number of people have felt a line has been crossed.

In 2007, the human rights watchdog Privacy International gave Google a “hostile to privacy” rating … unique among 23 top web companies rated in the study. Last year, Google dropped off the Ponemon Institute – a privacy and research organisation – list of the top 20 most trusted companies.

Would Google sell out our data to the highest bidder? Would it hand it over to the first Government agency to demand it? Google’s journey from counter-corporate culture icon with a clever name, cheeky logo and catchy company mantra to object of distrust and paranoia was as swift as it was inevitable.

But even as the romance with Google has waned, the company has continued to distinguish itself from the corporate mainstream by a canny mix of innovative thinking and careful image manipulation.

Google employees, although hardly overpaid in industry terms, enjoy some enviable perks, including: on-site health and dental care; free shuttle transport; even free take-out meals for new mothers and fathers while they are on maternity or paternity leave; and a much-lauded “Time Off” system that encourages engineers to spend 20 per cent of their work time on their own pet projects. It’s a system that has led to a number of recent Google innovations.

At the company’s California HQ – officially known as “Googleplex”, another mathematical joke-for-nerds… a googolplex is a number so giant it dwarfs a googol – massage rooms, games rooms, pianos and pool tables are scattered across the campus. For the past two years, Google has headed up Fortune magazine’s 100 Best Companies To Work For list.

The company’s proud of its environmental credentials, too. It’s Google.org charitable arm, headed by the charismatically-named Dr Larry Brilliant, lobbies on world health and poverty issues, and backs research and development and alternative energy start-ups.

In a typical example of Google doublethink, while Googleplex houses a nationally significant solar panel installation, aimed at creating some of the power needed to run its giant data banks, and pumps research and development money into hybrid car technology, Page and Brin traverse the globe in the Google jet – a stripped-out and tricked-out Boeing 767 with a reputation as a party plane.

But at the very heart of the Google conundrum is that while its technology continues to shape the modern web … organising its information, storing it and serving it, bringing it to life with a range of mapping technologies, it all, eventually, serves the advertising model that accounts for 99 per cent of Google’s revenue. Google might wear Gap cargo pants and ride a Segway, but it is a surprisingly old-fashioned business at heart.

Powerful? Certainly. It’s impossible, now, for many of us to imagine the web without it. Entire companies rely on its syndicated advertising network for revenue. Countless websites incorporate its mapping technology. The vast majority of us use it to navigate the internet.

But evil? Not yet.

* The National