How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows

But what is most striking about Google is its internal consistency. It is a beautifully considered machine, each piece seemingly true to all the rest. The appearance of advertising on a page, for example, follows the same rules that dictate search results or even new-product innovation. Those rules are simple, governed by supply, demand, and democracy -- which is more or less the logic of the Internet too.

Like its search engine, Google is a company overbuilt to be stronger than it has to be. Its extravagance of talent allows it crucial flexibility -- the ability to experiment, to try many things at once. "Flexibility is expensive," says Craig Silverstein, a 30-year-old engineer who dropped his pursuit of a Stanford PhD to become Google's first employee. "But we think that flexibility gives you a better product. Are we right? I think we're right. More important, that's the sort of company I want to work for."

And the sort of company that every company can learn from. What follows, then, is our effort to "google" Google: to search for the growth secrets of one of the world's most exciting growth companies. Like the logic of the search-engine itself, our search was deep and democratic. We didn't focus on Google's big three: CEO Eric Schmidt and founders Brin and Page. Instead, we went into the ranks and talked with the project managers and engineers who make Google tick. Here's what we learned.

Rule Number One: The User Is in Charge

"There are people searching the Web for 'spiritual enlightenment.' " Peter Norvig says this with such utter solemnity that it's impossible to tell for sure whether he gets the irony. Then again, Norvig is the guy who authored a hilarious PowerPoint translation of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (available at www.norvig.com), a geek classic. So maybe he's having fun.

But he's also making a point. When someone enters a query on Google for "spiritual enlightenment," it's not clear what he's seeking. The concept of spiritual enlightenment means something different from what the two words mean individually. Google has to navigate varying levels of literality to guess at what the user really wants.

This is where Googlers live, amid semantic, visual, and technical esoterica. Norvig is Google's director of search quality, charged with continuously improving people's search results. Google tracks the outcome of a huge sample of the queries that we throw at it. What percentage of users click on the first result that Google delivers? How many users click on something from the first page? Norvig's team members scour the data, looking for trouble spots. Then they tweak the engine.

The cardinal rule at Google is, If you can do something that will improve the user's experience, do it. It is a mandate in part born of paranoia: There's always a chance that the Google destroyer is being pieced together by two more guys in a garage. By some estimates, Google accounts for three-quarters of all Web searches. But because it's not perfect, being dominant isn't good enough. And the maniacal attack on imperfection reflects a genuine belief in the primacy of the customer.

That's why Google must correctly interpret searches by Turks and Finns, whose queries resemble complete sentences, and in Japanese, where words run together without spaces. It has to understand not only the meanings of individual words but also the relationships of those words to other words and the characteristics of those words as objects on a Web page. (A page that displays a search word in boldface or in the upper-right-hand corner, for example, will likely rank higher than a page with the same words displayed less prominently.)

It's why the difference between 0.3 seconds and 0.2 seconds is pretty profound. Most searches on Google actually take less than 0.2 seconds. That extra tenth of a second is all about the outliers: queries crammed with unrelated words or with words that are close in meaning. The outliers can take half a second to resolve -- and Google believes that users' productivity begins to wane after 0.2 seconds. So its engineers find ways to store ever-more-arcane Web-text snippets on its servers, saving the engine the time it takes to seek out phrases when a query is made.

And it's why, most of the time, the Google home page contains exactly 37 words. "We count bytes," says Google Fellow Urs Holzle, who is on leave from the University of California at Santa Barbara. "We count them because our users have modems, so it costs them to download our pages."

Just as important, every new word, button, or feature amounts to an assault on the user's attention. "We still have only one product," Holzle says. "That's search. People come to Google to search the Web, and the main purpose of the page is to make sure that you're not distracted from that search. We don't show people things that they aren't interested in, because in the long term, that will kill your business."