In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

kite-surfing teachers looking for students in their zip code.
In addition, people uploading videos for free viewing might be willing to pay Google to promote them as sponsored links—a one-click connection would then appear alongside organic search results like an AdWords ad, in either the search results page or the results page from a YouTube search. YouTube also began experimenting with “interest-based” advertising, in which ads would be personalized to the subjects that users had previously accessed. (This would be something that privacy-conscious users could opt out of.) Finally, YouTube was exploring something that Google Video had tried without success: paid viewing for premium videos.

A lot of his ideas for monetization, though, had the spirit of AdWords. Just as with Google search keywords, sometimes it was appropriate to show relevant ads with videos, sometimes not. “If I’m watching a kite-surfing video, it’s very likely that I’d be interested in buying the board that the kite surfer is on or taking a lesson from that person,” he says. Taking advantage of this symbiosis would open the door for bigger advertisers selling sports equipment or bathing suits, as well as small, long-tail advertisers, such as

But maybe the biggest contribution that Kamangar made was putting an end to the “silver bullet” theory—that lurking in someone’s imagination was a multibillion-dollar idea that would enrich YouTube as dramatically as AdWords had transformed Google’s bottom line. Since Kamangar had cocreated AdWords, he was able to declare that no such equivalent existed and YouTube should develop a broader, multifaceted revenue strategy, making use of some of the concepts of Google’s ad model but hitting some corner shots as well.

mental processes that made people think that they should defer to someone with a higher title. “That might help you on the savannah and it might help you in big companies, but it doesn’t help us at Google,” says Bock. “Eric and Larry want anybody to be able to tell someone, ‘You’re wrong,’ and give ten reasons why.” Titles got in the way of that.

Often, Google didn’t even share with employees what level they occupied on the ladder, an odd departure from its usual internal transparency. Bock would explain that the stealth was due to “cognitive heuristics.” These were the deep-seated

It’s about how we think.” Bock elaborated on how his team was shifting focus. Whereas People Operations had previously concentrated on maintaining the overtaxed Google hiring machine, now it would concentrate on “keeping people happy.” And how would it do that? With data, of course. Just as Google supplied analytics to website owners and advertisers, People Ops would develop a set of metrics to generate data to “inform people decisions.” There would even be a “people analytics team.” Bock’s group would conduct experiments and simulations in areas such as interviewing, hiring, compensation, and performance. They would construct statistical analysis curves to determine factors influencing Google’s attrition rate.

And because we’re Google, we’ll do it differently,” he says. “If we were GM or Exxon, we’d set up a committee full of people wearing ties, hire consultants, and come back with a memo saying ‘Here’s the answer.’ At Google, we said to our employees, ‘You live it every day, you tell us where the waste is.’” Google set up an array of web-based tools for the task and recruited the workforce to a data-driven scavenger hunt for waste

And because we’re Google, we’ll do it differently,” he says. “If we were GM or Exxon, we’d set up a committee full of people wearing ties, hire consultants, and come back with a memo saying ‘Here’s the answer.’ At Google, we said to our employees, ‘You live it every day, you tell us where the waste is.’” Google set up an array of web-based tools for the task and recruited the workforce to a data-driven scavenger hunt for waste.

The essential spec of a new browser was high speed. “Larry and Sergey wrote an OKR saying we should make the web as fast as flipping through a magazine,” says Pichai. “If things could be instant and there’s just no latency at all, the sky is the limit. I mean, we haven’t even scratched the surface.”

In 2007, Google conducted some user studies that measured the behavior of people whose search results were artificially delayed. One might think that the minuscule amounts of latency involved in the experiment would be negligible—they ranged between 100 and 400 milliseconds. But even those tiny hiccups in delivering search results acted as a deterrent to future searches. The reduction in the number of searches was small but significant, and were measurable even with 100 milliseconds (one-tenth of a second) latency. What’s more, even after the delays were removed, the people exposed to the slower results would take a long time to resume their previous level of searching.