Crap Curator: Two keys to Google’s success: “paranoia” and “relentless brutality”

Two keys to Google’s success: “paranoia” and “relentless brutality”

Posted by John Murrell on March 4th, 2010 at 6:57 am | Categorized as Uncategorized | Tagged as Google

With its daily presence in the tech headlines and its steady output of new products and features, we are well aware that Google never stands still, but who knew it was running scared? Listening to the remarks of John Herlihy, the company’s global ad operations chief, at a Dublin conference Wednesday, you might figure Andy Grove’s “Only the Paranoid Survive” is required reading around the Googleplex.

One of the fears driving the company right now, Herlihy said, is the possibility of upstart competitors gaining a beachhead in mobile search and advertising before Google is able to fully extend its hegemony. “In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant,” he declared (perhaps a tad prematurely). “In Japan, most research is done today on smartphones, not PCs. … Mobile makes the world’s information universally accessible. Because there’s more information and because it will be hard to sift through it all, that’s why search will become more and more important. This will create new opportunities for new entrepreneurs to create new business models — ubiquity first, revenue later. … The fear is the next Sergey and Larry will come up with a disruptive technology or service that will eliminate the need for Google. … There is a tremendous opportunity for entrepreneurs to end the need for Google. It’s our challenge not to let that happen by continuing to drive innovation and value. … Customers today have more choices and are more aware of our competitors’ offerings. Unless we can serve them 24/7, 365 days a year, competitors will eat our lunch. There is a level of paranoia there.”

So how does Google maintain its pace and sense of urgency? Through a Shiva-like dance of constant creation and destruction performed with “relentless brutality and execution,” said Herlihy. “Here’s an analogy,” he said. “The Roman legions used to send out scouts in different directions. If a scout didn’t return, the army didn’t head in that direction. We seek feedback at every opportunity on something — we either kill it, adjust it or redeploy resources. … We seek ubiquity and then pray for luck. We learn from bad decisions. If something is wrong, we kill it as soon as possible, take everybody out and move onto a different project as soon as possible.” And the process of regular and rigorous reviews extends to people as well as projects. “We measure people every 90 days,” Herlihy said. “We get 360-degree feedback on people every 180 days and that feedback is published to the whole company. People want reality. Ninety percent of the rewards end up going to 10 percent of the people.”

And indeed, the run of news out of Google on Wednesday provided evidence of this on-the-fly recalibration at work. About 15 months ago, Google rolled out a feature called SearchWiki that gave users the ability to re-rank and supplement search results so that that for a given query, their preferred sites would always show up at the top (see “Google: Here’s a new feature to help you serve us better“). Turns out, according to the feedback, that people liked the idea of marking certain search results available for future reference without adding to their bookmark clutter, but weren’t crazy about making extensive personal alterations to Google’s organic results. The result? SearchWiki is dead, replaced by a simpler “star” system that lets users designate favorite sites, then, in later searches, see their starred sites listed separately above the organic results. Considering Herlihy’s remarks, we can assume that if this approach fails to achieve ubiquity quickly enough, it too will be taken out behind the barn and shot.

Meanwhile, in other news from the Googleverse:

* Fresh out of Google Labs is a new app for mobile devices running Android 2.0 and up called Gesture Search, which lets you search for contacts, bookmarks and applications on your phone by drawing alphabet gestures on the touchscreen. Google says this should come in handy for times when existing search methods — tapping, typing or speaking — are inappropriate. Frankly, it’s hard for me to imagine running into to too many such situations, but the app is still pretty cool.

* Word out of the Search Marketing Expo is that Google is working on a system to let Web publishers of any size submit new content for indexing immediately upon publication, rather than waiting for Google’s spiders to come along and collect it.

* As part of its efforts in the area of smarter home energy management, Google has published an API that will allow manufacturers to build household devices able to communicate with the Google PowerMeter service, enabling plug-level monitoring of electricity consumption.