Google does evil

Google "Dalai Lama" in English and you get his website.

Google "Dalai Lama" in Chinese and you get Chinese government sites that attack the Dalai Lama.

In order to get a bite of the big Chinese pie, and put its servers in China, Google is bowing down to the Chinese government's version of the truth. It is allowing itself to be censored by the Chinese government in China. It has become part of the Chinese propaganda machine. It has sold its search function to the Chinese government as a propaganda tool for no price except the price of access.

It has gone against its own professed beliefs. It has broken its motto, "Don't do evil."

Google stands revealed as an immoral enterprise.

To Google, money is more important than ethics. Greed triumphs over truth.

The abject presentation of their butts to the Chinese government by Western companies shows us what cowards Western businessmen are. Devoid of morality. They will sell their children for a buck.

Google follows Yahoo in this regard, who gave the Chinese government the Internet address of an anonymous critic; the man was duly prosecuted and is now sitting in jail for 10 years.

Yahoo and Google: turncoats. Quislings. Betrayers of the truth -- and of western civilization.

Lenin's remark springs to mind, that capitalism would sell its enemies the rope to hang itself with. It's like Bush defending Western values by torturing people.

Is it too late to insist that corporations, if they can operate as independent legal entities, should also operate as moral agents -- and not be psychopaths?

Why should our economic system create entities that act immorally? What is wrong with our economic system that we can create these entities?

What Google is doing is a crime against humanity. Sergey Brin and Larry Page have sold their souls for gain. This wonderful company sees nothing wrong about being a propaganda tool.

Sergey and Larry are cowards. Devoid of principle. Hypocrites. Evil doers. Their mothers, I hope, are ashamed of them.


HERE ARE two pieces about Google: the one written this week, the other some years ago, before they went public.

1. The Global Id -- by John Lanchester
Books discussed: (i) The Google Story by David Vise. (ii) The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Battelle.

Google is the only multi-billion-dollar company in the world that is also a spelling mistake. Back in the palaeolithic era (that's the palaeolithic era in the internet sense, i.e. autumn 1997) its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were graduate computer science students at Stanford. They were working on an insanely cool new search engine, wanted to incorporate it as a company, and needed to find a name. David Vise, in his breezy book The Google Story , tells how they came up with one. A fellow graduate student suggested to Page and Brin that they use the name given to what is sometimes, erroneously or metaphorically, called the largest number, 10 100 : google. They looked up the name on the internet, found that it wasn't taken, and registered their brand-new brand, google.com. The next morning they found that the reason the name hadn't been taken was because it should be spelled googol -- and that googol.com had, of course, already been bagged. (It belonged, and still belongs, to a Silicon Valley software engineer and home-brewed beer enthusiast called Tim Beauchamp: "The links on this page are a mishmash of eclectic destinations that may be of interest to you. Actually, they may only be of interest to Tim but what the heck. It is his site!") Lesser men might have considered that a bad omen, but Larry and Sergey are not bad-omen kind of guys. Just over eight years later, Google is the fastest-growing company in the history of the world -- with, at the time of writing, a market capitalisation of $138 billion. Larry and Sergey, the Wallace and Gromit of the information age, are worth more than $10 billion each.

Companies are a bit like people in that they tend to bear the imprint of the milieu in which they were formed. Google, spelling mistake and all, is a product of the intensely academic environment in which both Page and Brin were raised. Page was born in Michigan, Brin in Russia, but apart from that their backgrounds were eerily alike: ethnically but not religiously Jewish, educated in Montessori schools, their fathers both university professors of science (computer science at Michigan and maths at Maryland, respectively), their mothers both also super-numerate (database consultancy and Nasa -- it must be fun to say "my mum works at Nasa"). Brin was 16 when he began taking classes at the University of Maryland, and 19 when he graduated. He went to Stanford to begin work on his PhD. Page, who had done his first degree at the University of Michigan, came there a year later to have a look at the computer science PhD programme. On a Stanford orientation day in 1995, looking round San Francisco, Page began arguing with the tour guide, a second-year comp. sci. PhD student whose opinionated obnoxiousness so closely resembled his own. You have seen enough buddy movies to know what happened next.

The key idea which underlies Google came out of this academic milieu; it was an insight that could occur only to someone thoroughly marinated in academic ways of thinking. John Battelle, an internet-world insider and search-engine specialist, gives a fascinating account of it in his indispensable book The Search . Page was fooling around at Stanford, trying to come up with an idea for his PhD thesis. He had always been interested in Nikola Tesla, a scientist whose list of brilliant inventions -- wireless communication and X-rays to solar cells and the modern power grid -- was not matched by the success he had in marketing them, or himself. Page liked the idea of making things that caught on; he had no interest in hiding his light under a bushel. He began to think about his own web page, and who was reading it, and whether or not anyone was not just reading it but linking to it -- which would definitely be an indication of a more than casual interest. But while it was easy to find the outward links from a web page, it was not at all straightforward to find out the reverse, who was linking to that site. So Page wrote a program which solved the problem of finding out who was linking to any given web page. He called the program BackRub.

Once BackRub had been written, Page began to wonder if there was a way of using it to determine the utility of any particular site -- and this is when he, or he and Brin, had a big idea. It was based on one of the most widely mocked areas in academia, that of bibliometrics: assessing the importance of any given article or piece of information by measuring how often other people in the field mention it. In bibliometrics, no attempt is made to see how sensible or useful or well-argued a piece of work is: all you do is count how often it is mentioned. This never-mind-the-quality-feel-the-width approach sounds like a ridiculous way of assessing the importance of intellectual work but it is, I am told, a surprisingly powerful tool. In any case, it is what gave Page and Brin the idea for a program which measured the importance of a web page by counting how often other web pages linked to it. Page gave the mathematical algorithm which worked out this problem the name PageRank.

Then the boys set out to build a search engine which used PageRank. (The patent for PageRank, incidentally, is owned by Stanford University. Google have exclusive use of it until 2011.) The idea was that a search engine which knew how important a page was would have a powerful advantage in assessing the quality of the information on that page. The search engine would not only be able to look for specific words, it would have a way of assessing the quality of data on the page where those words occur. That would give it a huge advantage in delivering useful information.

As for how it works in practice, the first thing to realise is that Google does not search the internet. If it did, the internet would grind to a halt under the strain of all the searching taking place, because Google alone (let alone the competition) makes upwards of 100 million searches every day. Instead the program searches a copy of the internet stored on its own computers. It sends out a 'crawler' which downloads copies of internet pages. A full circuit of all the web pages in the world takes roughly a month, which is why the information on Google is often a few days old; the most recent snapshot of the page copied back to the Googleplex is available as the 'Cached' link on any given Google result. (This delay is one of several reasons why, if you can't find anything on Google, it is worth trying an alternative search engine, such as Yahoo or Clusty.) Having copied the internet, it then indexes it. Google makes an index of every word on a web page, where it stands in relation to other words, whether or not a word is listed in a title, whether it is listed in a special typeface, how frequently it is listed on the page and so on. It also gives a lot of importance to the PageRank of the page in question. There are more than a hundred of these criteria, and Google gives a numeric weight to every one of them, for every searchable term on every one of eight billion web pages. When a query arrives -- which it does at the rate of many times every second -- Google searches the index for the relevant terms, measures the relevance of the results using all its various metrics including PageRank, crunches out a single number for each page, and lists them, with the highest score at the top, usually within half a second or so.

Even if you didn't know a thing about computers, you could tell this involved a truly scary amount of computational power. This is another area in which Google's origins show up as a strength. When the program was first conceived, Page thought he would be able to download an entire copy of the internet to his own PC. That turned out not to be the case: Page and Brin ended up having to scrounge, cadge, rustle up and 'borrow' every scrap of computational power they could find at Stanford to gather the necessary data. What they learned in the process became one of their great strengths. Google does not run on huge, expensive mainframe computers but on a very large number of bog-standard, over-the-counter PCs, the same sort used by ordinary mortals. The PCs are tweaked and cabled together in particular ways to provide Google's 'special sauce' -- this is one of the revelations in David Vise's book -- and run a customised, stripped-down version of Linux. When a PC breaks, they chuck it away and replace it. Nobody knows just how many of these PCs Google has. John Hennessy, the president of Stanford and a Google board member, says that it's 'the largest computer system in the world.' Vise puts the figure at more than 100,000 PCs. Without their experience in graduate student bodging, the founders of Google would never have learned how to put together a computer cluster that combined such replaceable simplicity with such computational muscle. Its main problem these days is the heat generated by all those silicon chips.

The boys took the company public in 2004, leaving it as late as they could, this being one of the many ways in which Google diverged from the Silicon Valley norm during the long-lost boom. The general pattern during the internet gold rush was to launch a company as early as possible, and hope that investors bought the shares before the company ran out of cash. That was because most dot.coms had no money; their business model involved truly spectacular revenue projections, set some distance in the future. A standard pitch started by pointing out the size of some market -- to take the example used in the cautionary documentary Dot.Com, that for paying parking tickets. Say $1 billion worth of parking tickets are paid every year. Say the company servicing the payments earns 30 per cent of the fee. Say you could set up an online service to pay these tickets, and then -- and this was the enticingly pseudo-sensible part of the pitch -- take into account that only, say, 20 per cent of the public will be willing to pay in this convenient new way. Lo, you have just created a business with annual revenue of $60 million, and extraordinary potential to expand when other local or national government payment services migrate online. Your company is now worth a couple of billion dollars. Or it will be soon. 'Grow big fast!' (That was one of the battle-cries of the internet age.) 'If you build it, they will come!' (That was another.) Set up an Initial Public Offering, quick! There's gold in them thar bills!

Fresh new thinking along these lines caused one of the greatest destructions of capital ever seen. Google's route was superficially similar. They concentrated on making their search technology the best. Traffic to the site grew at great speed, all without a cent spent on marketing. The company had as yet no business model; as one of its directors said, 'we'll figure out how to monetise that.' This was exactly the thinking that cost so many people so much money. The difference was that Google managed to do it, and they did so by building a huge business in the most nickel-and-dime way imaginable, through small ads. Next time you do a search on Google, have a look at the 'Sponsored Links' on the right of the results. These are paid advertisements. The ads have been bid for by people who bid for specific words, or combinations of words: 75c for 'digital camera', to take an example from The Google Story , but $1.08 for 'digital cameras' (because people who click on the plural are more likely actually to buy them), or $30 for 'mesothelioma' (because the people who place the ads are personal injury lawyers looking for clients who want to sue whoever it was they think gave them this particular cancer). Many of the words cost only a few cents to bid for: 30c for 'pet food', for instance. If you click on one of the links, the advertiser pays Google the agreed amount.

Google's ads are so effective at generating income because they tap directly into the intentions of people looking for things. An ad in any normal medium is, to one degree or another, a form of broadcasting: it will appear in front of many people who have no interest in it, en route to finding the minority on whom it will exert some grip. Google's ads appear only in front of people who are already looking for the thing they are advertising; they are as narrowcast as advertising can possibly be. The general realisation of this was accompanied by the dawning knowledge that Google in effect has a direct line, if not quite to the unconscious dreaming mind of the world, at least to the part of it which voices its wishes. This was something no one foresaw about the internet, that its 'killer app' -- the thing which made it indispensable to ordinary people -- was the ability to find services and information. The received wisdom in the business was that search was a 'commodity', something it was simple to buy from the cheapest provider. In disproving that, Google showed that it was wired straight into the global id.

The underlying idea of search-plus-ads was not original: a company called Overture was already doing the same (and Google later settled a suit from Overture out of court). But nobody did it anywhere near as well as Google, and the success of Ad Words (as it is called) is the reason Google, instead of rushing to the stock market as quickly as possible, which is what everyone else did, took as long as they could to go public. They knew that as soon as their revenue figures were disclosed, everyone would go nuts, and their competitors would begin knocking themselves out to get into this amazing new business of search-plus-ads. They had a secret, and it was the opposite secret from every other internet start-up: their secret was that they were already making a ton of money. They have continued to do so. Google in the six months to 30 June 2005 earned $2.6 billion, almost entirely from its ads. It was sitting on more than $3 billion and had no borrowings, and it has since raised another $4 billion in cash. This sheer financial muscle is the reason Google is now such a power in the world.

The financial success of Google since its IPO means that Page and Brin can now do more or less what they like. The limits on their company are set not by what they can afford but by what they can conceive and bring off. The stated mission of Google is 'to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful', an immodest project, to put it mildly, but one on which Google is at least in a position to make a decent start. But the remorseless focus implied by that 'mission statement' is a little misleading, since the company's philosophy is to give bright people a free rein to attack the problems that interest them, and 20 per cent of employees' time is devoted to pet projects of their own devising. This makes Google a great centre of 'if you build it, they will come,' and means that the company is constantly coming up with new schemes and wheezes, not all of which make a coherent whole, but which tend at the least to be interesting ideas. It also means that barely a day goes by without a news story touching on Google in some respect or other.

Since I began writing this piece Google has been in the headlines several times: for governments' complaints about the spy-friendly potential of the all too detailed satellite maps in Google Earth; for a new feature called Music Search, which does what it says on the tin; for announcing a plan to take a 5 per cent stake in AOL; for being vulnerable to 'black hat' tactics from Search Engine Optimisers, who specialise in boosting Google results; and for hugely expanding its nascent Google Video service. The media are obsessed with Google, not least because they are so worried by it. (The general consensus is that Google, having once been seen as a technology company, should instead be regarded as a media company. You may not think it matters, but money people like to see things through the prism of a 'business model'.) Other recent stories have concerned Google's offering the whole of San Francisco free wireless access to the internet, setting up a free Google Space at Heathrow airport to allow people to use its products, launching Google Talk as a potentially disruptive way of making free phone calls over the internet, pressing on with its ambitions for Google Book Search (formerly Google Library) to 'make the full text of all the world's books searchable by anyone', and launching Google Base to take over the world's classified advertising market. In the meantime, the company has launched a Toolbar, including a Desktop Search tool which searches for information on users' own PCs -- something Microsoft, the world's biggest software company, has been trying and failing to do for a number of years.

What scares people about this is the feeling that Google has a masterplan, and that they are advancing towards world information and financial dominance. It isn't clear that that's right, though. My sense of it (and it's only a sense) is that Google advances more by letting its engineers invent things and solve problems, or perceived problems, one at a time, and that as long as the problem being solved broadly fits with the overall mission statement, they'll go ahead with it. Some of these stabs seem well thought out, others less so. At the same time the core focus on search stays. People who work in the field say that search is only 5 per cent 'solved', and that the huge amount of information located on the internet but (for a variety of reasons) unavailable to searches remains an enormously difficult problem to solve. It seems likely that this focus will give the company plenty to chew on for many years, even after the overheated share price cools off.

So: is Google a good thing? The geek in me wants to say yes. It certainly has made finding information incomparably easier. Some of the information is even true . . . Actually, that's not fair, but a lot of what is on the net is false, and the Google-derived mistake is something you do now notice in the mainstream media. One example occurred on the death of Hunter S. Thompson. When he died, several newspapers shared with us, often in the opening sentence, President Nixon's opinion that 'Hunter S. Thompson represented the dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character.' Except (as any Hunter S. Thompson fan will tell you) Nixon didn't say that about Thompson, Thompson said it about Nixon. But a site giving the line the wrong way around was the first thing to come up on Google on the day of Thompson's death.

Despite such glitches, Google is from the research point of view invaluable. I've used it on a more or less daily basis for the last five years, but it was only when I began working on this piece that I fully realised just how many features it has added, as part of an ambition to do 'something intelligent' with every query. Google Scholar, which searches academic papers, is very useful, and will become more so. The powerful calculator feature, which will do advanced maths as well as highly practical things like converting square feet into metres, is useful. The character ~ lets you search for synonyms, and is useful. Google News, which was invented by an engineer, Krishna Bharat, using his 20 per cent time to come up with a broadly global news service in the wake of 9/11, is useful, and terrifies conventional news organisations. The translation service isn't useful yet, but I bet it will be one day. The command 'define' is a useful quick way of finding what a word means. The blog search is fairly handy and will get better. Google Earth isn't particularly useful, but it is brutally cool: you begin with a satellite view and gradually descend to earth, homing in with a level of detail which can give you a view of your own house (also, it turns out, of secret military installations). Gmail, with its super-swift searching and 2GB of free space, is amazing, if you don't mind the fact that your email is scanned and used to target ads (and stored indefinitely). Google Maps is useful, and, because Google lets people write APIs (application programming interfaces) to adapt its programs in ways they find personally helpful, will grow more and more useful over time. One dark example: an API giving a map of sex offenders in the USA, which lets people see whether there are any registered sex offenders near them, and where the sex offender lives. Nice.

On a lighter note, Froogle, the shopping search service, is sort of useful, and has a feature which chills the blood of conventional retailers: when you're out in the high street and see something you want to buy, you can text its name to 64664 and Froogle will text back the best price it can find online. Also cool is Google Zeitgeist, which tells you which search terms have most increased in frequency in the past year. For 2005 the top five items are Myspace, Ares, Baidu, Wikipedia and Orkut -- all of which, I notice in my trendspotting hat, involve some sort of sharing, searching, meeting or collaborating online. It must be said that the coolness of Zeitgeist is reduced by the fact that it no longer lists the most declining search terms. In 2002, the last year they gave this info, the five most increased searches were for Spider-Man, Shakira, Winter Olympics, World Cup and Avril Lavigne; the five most decreased searches were for Nostradamus, Napster, Anthrax, World Trade Center and Osama bin Laden. Thus did we recover from the trauma of 9/11.

Technologically, Google is an amazing thing. As for whether it is a good thing, that depends on what happens next. The company is keen to stress that, because of the voting structure of its shareholdings, it remains in the control of its founders. It is keen to send little signals of its own geekiness: its official IPO filing, for instance, announced that it would sell $2,718,281,828 worth of shares -- a number based on e, the so-called natural logarithm, a number intimately familiar to maths nerds. On 18 August last year the company announced that it would sell 14,159,265 shares, with the intention of raising about $4 billion in cash, to do they would not say what -- the point here (apart from the huge amount of money) being that the number of shares was based on the value of pi, 3.14159265. And then there's the fact that Google makes itself available in dozens of languages, including pig Latin and Klingon. These unfunny semi-jokes are designed to show that Google is rooted in the same comp. sci. culture in which it was born, and retains the same focus on the pure excellence of its products.

That does not mean that Google is always aware of the consequences of its actions in the wider world. A strength of the firm -- its rootedness in grad student nerd culture-- is also a weakness, in the form of a certain arrogance and unwillingness to pay attention to views emanating from lesser forms of life. The example of this currently preoccupying the publishing business is Google Book Search, the plan to scan all the world's books and have them available for search. This sounds ambitious, to put it mildly, but Google have the resources and the determination to do it, and they have been working at it for some time, beginning with the libraries of Michigan, Stanford and Oxford. They are digitising millions of books in these collections, and have already begun providing access to the out of copyright volumes. Google began to digitise currently copyrighted books in America until they were stopped by a lawsuit from the American Association of Publishers.

A fundamental clash of cultures is at work here. To Google, with its mission to 'organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful', it is obvious that books, which contain so much information -- accurate information too, far more so than on the web -- must be searchable online. The plan is not simply to give the books away: although the whole book will be scanned and stored, only specific fragments of text will be displayed. It will be the best shop window ever for obscure texts. Besides, isn't their company policy 'Don't be evil'? But to publishers, there is something outrageously hypocritical about the contrast between Google's ferocious protection of its own intellectual property rights and its contempt for everyone else's. What's to stop Google giving free online access to the books once they are scanned? It's probably against the law, sure, but a sufficiently ruthless company which perceived a sufficiently strong demand could find ways around that. Once the texts were scanned and stored, the only thing preventing every writer's work from being given away free would be a few pieces of computer code on Google's servers. At the moment Google say they have no intention of providing access to this content; but why should anybody believe them?

More generally, the biggest single area of worry about Google involves privacy. This has been a long-running subject of concern on the net, but thanks to an op-ed piece in the New York Times in November it has begun to attract some wider attention. The paper pointed out that the prosecution in a recent North Carolina strangulation case drew into evidence the fact that the defendant had made Google searches on the words 'neck' and 'snap'. This brought to wider notice the fact that Google logs all the searches made on it, and stores this information indefinitely; and Google installs a cookie on the computer of everyone who uses it, which helps log that user's searches, and which isn't due to expire until 2038. Because every computer has a unique IP address, every visit to every website can be traced back to the computer making it -- a fact well known in geek circles but remarkably under-publicised outside them. (Last April a Chinese journalist called Shi Tao was given ten years in jail for 'leaking state secrets' after Yahoo! in Hong Kong handed over information linking his IP address and his email to the Chinese authorities.) Users of Google's Gmail service have already given the company their identity, a full record of all their searches, and copies of all their emails, stored indefinitely. According to the tech guru Robert Cringely, the future of Google lies in combining the company's knowledge of who you are with its Google Video service to produce microscopically targeted TV ads. 'Google imagines a world where only single people see match.com ads, and people who can't drive see ads from taxi companies where others see Toyota campaigns. Where fraternities see ads for strip clubs, beer, Cancun weekends and LSAT prep courses, and only seniors (and their adult children) see ads for Alzheimer's drugs.' In case that doesn't seem sufficiently dystopian, one should bear in mind that the information stored at Google is vulnerable to legal subpoena. It's not hard to imagine this information being sought by governments, litigants or divorcing spouses, and the list does not stop there. Google badly needs to develop tools which ensure privacy.

The alarming potency of Google as a way of finding out information about people is a different subject; though the fact that its potency can be alarming is not in dispute. A journalist at Cnet, a tech-news portal, did half an hour's Google research on Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of the company, and published the results, by way of showing just how effective Google was at this kind of thing. Schmidt, outraged, threw a major strop and Google announced it would not speak to anyone from Cnet for a year (so there!). But personal information is easily found, especially in America, where phone directories are reverse-searchable and social security numbers are simply obtained. So far, everyone who has invested in Google has made out like the proverbial bandit; but one day the share price will drop, and people who've bought shares will find that they've lost money. It is then that Google's leaders will come under pressure to find some uses for that unprecedented goldmine of personal data. As for privacy in relation to governments, the company's existing privacy policy says that 'we may share information' if 'we conclude that we are required by law or have a good faith belief that access, preservation or disclosure of such information is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users or the public.' You don't have to be Diogenes the Cynic to think that this gives Google the latitude to do pretty much whatever it wants. Let's not forget that in February 2004 Google, having brought its news service to China, immediately gave in to the Chinese government and omitted links to sites which the Chinese government did not want its citizens to see. This was the first big test of Google's loudly proclaimed 'Don't be evil' policy in a context where the company would have been preferring principle to money, and it was one they failed.

Putting all this together, we reach the conclusion that, on the one hand, Google is cool. On the other hand, Google has the potential to destroy the publishing industry, the newspaper business, high street retailing and our privacy. Not that it will necessarily do any of these things, but for the first time, considered soberly, these things are technologically possible. The company is rich and determined and is not going away any time soon. They know what they are doing technologically; socially, though, they can't possibly know, and I don't think anyone else can either. These are the earliest days in a process of what may turn out to be radical change. The best historical analogy for where Google is today probably comes from the time when the railroads were being built. Everyone knew that trains and railways would change the world, but no one predicted the invention of suburbs. Google, and the increased flow of information on which it rides and from which it benefits, is the railway. I don't think we've yet seen the first suburbs.

(John Lanchester is the author of three novels: The Debt to Pleasure, Mr Phillips and Fragrant Harbour.)


2. Google vs. Evil
The world's biggest, best-loved search engine owes its success to supreme technology and a simple rule: Don't be evil. Now the geek icon is finding that moral compromise is just the cost of doing big business.
By Josh McHugh

Life used to be so much easier for Sergey Brin. In the autumn of 1998, he and Larry Page unleashed Google with a clear mission: Help computer users find exactly what they want on the Internet. Newbies flocked to the site, grateful for a simple search engine that was both powerful and intuitive. More sophisticated techies came to appreciate Google's computational elegance and its willingness to shun the "portal" model that crammed ecommerce down their throats. Within months, Google became one of the most popular sites on the Web - and not long after that, "Google" became a verb. Today, Internet users spend about 15 million hours a month on the site. Google.com logs more than 28 million visitors each month, nearly as many as Yahoo! and MSN. Nearly four out of five Internet searches happen on Google or on sites that license its technology.

Google owes its swelling popularity to deft algorithms that quickly divine what's useful on the Web. But there's more to it than that. At Google, purity matters. Over the years, Brin and Page have resisted pressure to run banners, opting instead for haiku-like text ads and unintrusive sponsored links. They've taken a stand against pop-ups and pop-unders and refused ads from sites they consider to be overly negative. All the while, they've stubbornly kept the Google homepage concise and pristine. On just a faint whisper of a marketing campaign, the company pulled in an estimated $70 million last year (a third from licensing fees and the rest from ads).

The Google strategy appeals to every engineer's sense of The Way It Should Be. Build the best entry in the science fair. Do not tart it up. Do not make it more clever than it needs to be.

But a funny thing is happening on the way to Internet adulthood - Google's awkward teen years. The company's growth spurt has spawned a host of daunting questions that no data-retrieval system can easily answer. Should Google play ball with repressive foreign governments? Refuse to link users to "hate" sites? Punish marketers who artificially inflate site rankings? Fight the Church of Scientology's attempts to silence critics? And what to do about the cache, Google's archive of previously indexed pages? In April, the German national railroad threatened legal action to remove an obsolete site containing sabotage instructions.

Most major companies refer to a detailed code of corporate conduct when considering such policy decisions. General Electric devotes 15 pages on its Web site to an integrity policy. Nortel's site has 34 pages of guidelines. Google's code of conduct can be boiled down to a mere three words: Don't be evil.

Very Star Wars . But what does it mean?

"Evil ," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil."

Of the Google triumvirate, Schmidt makes sure the company stays on course financially and strategically; Page keeps busy in the R&D lab, cranking out new features; and the 29-year-old Brin, in his role as Google's conscience and head policymaker, spends his days gripping the moral tiller - and in so doing, imposes his worldview on everyone else.

That puts Brin at the flashpoint of most of the major Internet-related controversies. He knows his decisions have far-reaching consequences. He feels the pressure that attends Google's growing power. "I do get fairly stressed," Brin says. "I'd like to feel a little less scrutinized."

Google has succeeded by adhering to one, pure principle: Do good by users. Now, for the first time in its history, Google is facing rifts between what's good for users and what's good for Google. And Sergey Brin is finding that purity just doesn't scale.

II.

Don't be evil . Brin has had to refer back to those three words quite a bit over the past year. Governments, religious bodies, businesses, and individuals are all bearing down on the company, forcing Brin to make decisions that have an effect on the entire Internet. "Things that would normally be side issues for another company carry the weight of responsibility for us," Brin says.

In March, lawyers representing the Church of Scientology requested that Google stop linking to a Norwegian anti-Scientology site called Operation Clambake. The church claimed the site, xenu.net, displayed copyrighted Scientology content and that by providing links to the information, Google was in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Much to the dismay of many First Amendment fans, Google caved, removing the offending pages from its index.

In May, Anita Roddick, the outspoken British founder of the Body Shop, blasted Google in her blog for yanking a text ad for her site. Google's explanation: Roddick had called actor John Malkovich a "vomitous worm" in her blog, violating a Google policy against accepting ads for sites that are "anti-" anything. After Roddick protested, Google offered to reinstate the ad in exchange for a promise from Roddick that she would remove the Malkovich reference from the first page of her site. When she refused, Brin had a decision to make: Should he give in and accept Roddick's money, or stand by his principles? He chose his principles.

Three months later, Daniel Brandt, who runs google-watch.org, attacked PageRank, the algorithm at the heart of Google's vaunted system, accusing the company of being unfair and undemocratic. Brandt urged the FTC to investigate Google and regulate it as a public utility - as a company that, in effect, controls access to the Internet's natural resources. The mainstream press tended to dismiss Brandt as a webmaster spurned by a low Google ranking, but in the online forums and weblogs, many agreed with his assertion. As far as search engines go, Google has become the only game in town.

Then in the first week of September, Brin found himself pulled into matters of foreign policy. He received several emails from users telling him that the Chinese government, worried about political dissent in the weeks before the 16th Chinese Party Congress, had shut down access to the site. "Our Chinese traffic was down by a factor of five," Brin says. "We were blocked."

Brin was no expert on international diplomacy. So he ordered a half-dozen books about Chinese history, business, and politics on Amazon.com and splurged on overnight shipping. He consulted with Schmidt, Page, and David Drummond, Google's general counsel and head of business development, then put in a call to tech industry doyenne Esther Dyson for advice and contacts. Google has no offices in China, so Brin enlisted go-betweens to get the message to Chinese authorities that Google would be very interested in working out a compromise to restore access. "We didn't want to do anything rash," Brin says. "The situation over there is more complex than I had imagined."

Four days later, Chinese authorities restored access to the site. How did that happen? For starters, the Chinese government was deluged with outcries from the nation's 46 million Internet users when access to Google was cut off. "Internet users in China are an apolitical crowd," says Xiao Qiang, executive director of New York-based Human Rights In China. "They tend to be people who are doing well, and they don't usually voice strong views. But this stepped into their digital freedom."

The quick workaround: Chinese authorities tweaked the national firewall, making the new Google China different from the site that was turned off. Today, Chinese who use Google to search on terms like "falun gong" or "human rights in china" receive a standard-looking results page. But when they click on any of the results, either their browsers are redirected to a blank or government-approved page, or their computers are blocked from accessing Google for an hour or two. "They have a new mechanism that can block the results of certain searches," Brin says. Did Google help China find or obtain the filtering technology? "We didn't make changes to our servers" is all he'll say.

In late October, a report by two Harvard researchers revealed that Google had begun filtering its own servers to block users in Germany, France, and Switzerland from accessing sites carrying material likely to be judged racist or inflammatory in each country. Neither Brin nor anyone else at Google will talk about about the preemptive self-censoring moves in Europe.

In the wake of these international incidents, members of Google's loyal, tech-savvy constituency began to question the company's motives. "I am a little on the fence about Google's latest actions," wrote Brian Osborne, a staff writer for Geek.com, a news site. "On one hand, I understand Google's stance that it must remain in compliance with German and French laws. Nevertheless, Google is putting itself on a very slippery slope."

III.

"What is this?" asks a visitor squinting at the form he must sign before proceeding to the cafeteria at Google's Mountain View, California, headquarters. "An NDA? To have lunch?"

The receptionist shrugs. "This is Google," she says. "They're crazy that way."

The Googleplex, contrary to almost every written account of the place, is hardly a haven of easygoing geek whimsy. The cafeteria is adorned with a tie-dyed banner, but the Google employees aren't humming any Dead songs. Most of them appear deadly serious. Brin's second-floor office overlooks a courtyard festooned with empty hammocks. A book about Enron rests on his coffee table.

Brin's designation as Google's policy maven is relatively new. He, the big thinker, and Page, the mad scientist, complemented each other and shared nearly every role in Google's early years. "Larry was always the driver," says Scott Hassan, who did much of the programming for the original Google. "A big part of his role was going around and yelling 'Why can't it do this? Why isn't this working?'" Brin would sit next to Hassan and watch him write code, pointing out errors and taking an occasional turn at the keyboard.

The frenetic Page looked at all the popular engines at the time and decided they were going about search the wrong way. By relying on HTML code - meta tags as well as page text - they would bring back all sorts of irrelevant information and open themselves up to massive manipulation by webmasters looking to increase their own rankings. Brin took Page's observation and ran with it. He figured the best way around the problem was to harness the vast repository of human judgments already preserved on the Internet in the form of hyperlinks. "Most people search for local maximums - like figuring out how to get the best car, the best immediate situation," Hassan says. "Sergey is always searching for global maximums."

By 2001, Google's breakneck growth convinced Page and Brin it was time to establish a more rigid structure. Page handed over the CEO title to Schmidt and became copresident with Brin. The move freed up Page to focus on developing his knack for product development (as a child, he crafted a printer out of spare parts and Lego blocks). Brin's passion for the big picture made him the natural choice to spend time on Google's growing role in the world.

Which means Brin's views on politics and policy matter quite a bit. Not that he's willing to talk. He tells me he listens to NPR on his morning drive to work. I think Democrat and ask about his voter affiliation. He says he votes across party lines. Independent? He smiles and tells me there's no easy shortcut toward figuring out how he comes to his decisions about good and evil. And even if there was, he wouldn't let me in on it. If I succeed in figuring out exactly what he considers good and evil, people who don't care about Google users might start gaming him the way they try to game his search engine.

Born in Moscow and raised in the suburbs of Washington, DC, Brin grew up listening in on conversations at the dinner parties thrown by his father, a math professor, and his mother, a NASA scientist. Talking about his decisions and the values he holds most dear, Brin chooses his language carefully, but one word he repeatedly comes back to is "useful." And while Google's policy decisions over the past year look a bit haphazard at first glance, they begin to make more sense in a worldview where usefulness is the paramount virtue.

Aside from the indisputable goodness of causing hard-line Communist Party officials to say the word "Google" to one another for a few days, it's difficult to say on which side of the good-evil line the company's China resolution falls. Brin seems at peace with how it all turned out. "Political searches are not that big a fraction of the searches coming out of China," he says. "You want to look at the total value picture that a search engine like Google brings and think of all that it's used for."

But Xiao Qiang, the activist, thinks the company should have taken a firmer stand. "Ultimately, China's state censorship mechanism will have to submit to this growing demand for freedom from Chinese netizens," Xiao says. "It's important to protect integrity, particularly for an Internet firm."

On the same day that China blocked access to Google, it also flipped the switch on AltaVista. AltaVista issued a defiant statement to the media and went on to list several ways to access the site. Months later, AltaVista is still blocked. Brin figures that by meeting China halfway, Google remained available - and useful - to visitors and also preserved its advertising revenue there. "You have to look at the total value picture," he says.

What about the Scientology mess? Didn't Google give in too easily? Jennifer Urban, a fellow at Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law and a member of Chilling Effects, an organization formed to document attempts to stifle speech on the Internet, says that from a legal standpoint, Google's hands were tied. "To qualify for safe harbor protection from liability, they really have to err on the side of taking down the link," Urban says.

In fact, Google didn't fold entirely. After consulting with Brin, Kulpreet Rana, Google's head of IP, found a way that Google could comply with the law without letting the Scientologists erase their critics from the Internet. The solution: When Google gets a request to remove a link under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA Section 512, it substitutes a link to a form on the Chilling Effects' site. The form contains the Web address of the page in question, and anyone still interested in the site can direct their browser to the address.

Does abiding by the letter of a bad and flimsy law absolve Google from charges that it squashed free expression? Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is certain that a vigorous legal challenge would put an end to the steady flow of Section 512 filings Google receives but admits she doesn't expect Google to devote its resources to such a broad fight. And while some cheered Google's workaround as evidence of a rebellious bit of payback - a small point scored against the enemies of unfettered speech - the move is another instance of Brin choosing the path of usefulness over a righteous crusade.

IV.

If Brin's code of good and evil permits the company to negotiate with sovereign governments and allows for some legal meddling from unpopular religions, there is no wiggle room - no gray area whatsoever - when it comes to those who attempt to subvert the power of Google to their own commercial ends. One thing Brin is sure of: On the side of evil lies trickery.

I ask Brin to imagine, for a moment, running his company's evil twin, a sort of anti-Google. "We would be doing things like having advertising that wasn't marked as being paid for. Stuff that violates the trust of the users," he says, describing a site that sounds not unlike the pay-for-placement search site Overture. "Say someone came looking for breast cancer information and didn't know that some listings were paid for with money from drug companies. We'd be endangering people's health."

The anti-Google might also be more amenable to the growing business of "optimization," the altering of Web sites so that they rank higher in search engine results. For a fee, there's help for a Dallas plumber who's unhappy that his site is on the 17th page of results when someone types "Dallas plumber" into Google. An optimizer will tweak the site in such a way that boosts it to, say, the 3rd page of results.

To pull this off with Google, an optimizer needs to understand how the company's search mechanism works. Google uses 100 or so closely guarded algorithms to determine its search results. The best known of the lot is called PageRank, which allocates relevancy to a page according to the number and importance of pages linked to it, the number and importance of pages linked to each of those pages, and so on. One ploy is to create "link farms," in which an optimizer gets clients to link to one another, racking up relevancy points. In general, optimizers make a living by guessing what Google regards as important. The way Brin sees it, the optimizers are co-opting Google's bond of trust with its users. He regards optimizers the way a mother grizzly might regard a hunter jabbing at her cub with a stick.

Every month, when Google updates its index and its mix of algorithms, it rakes a disruptive claw across the optimizers' systems. In the industry, the monthly shuffle is known as the Google Dance, and Brin doesn't mind letting on that if Google ends up dancing all over the optimizers, so much the better. "When we change and improve our technology, things get shuffled around," Brin says, "and sometimes it has a disproportionate effect on optimization sites."

Consider the case of Bob Massa, a former solid oak dining room furniture salesman who lives in Oklahoma City and runs SearchKing, an optimization company he started in 1997. Last summer, Massa received a rare gift from Google in the form of the Google Toolbar, a software program that lets users perform searches without going to Google.com. More important for Massa, the Toolbar shows the approximate PageRank, on a scale of one to ten, of whatever page a user is visiting. It was the first time since Brin and Page were in grad school that they'd shared so much technical information. After years of watching Google's every move like an Etruscan high priest trying to augur divine intent from cloud formations, Massa had a piece of the goods. On August 9, Massa started selling optimization based on PageRank.

After the Google Dance of September 20, most of Massa's customers suddenly found themselves in a heap at the very bottom of Google's 3 billion site index. It seems that the improvements Google had made included a severe downgrade of sites with links to SearchKing. Massa's customers, needless to say, were very, very unhappy. "Everyone thinks I'm the biggest idiot in the world for making Google mad," Massa said in October.

He filed suit a few weeks later, charging that Google downgraded his customers' scores in a deliberate attempt to put him out of business. The suit asks for an injunction forcing Google to restore the scores to pre-Dance levels, and seeks $75,000 in damages. "It's a classic good versus evil thing," says Massa, turning Brin's framework back on Google itself. "I knew they wouldn't like it. I didn't think they'd go so far as to wipe out all these little people."

The day Massa's suit was filed, the reaction from the Slashdot crowd and most other forums was predictably vociferous, with posters stumbling over themselves to craft metaphors painting Massa as a criminal suing his victim. But gradually, a surprising number of people, while careful not to look as though they were defending Massa, began tagging the search engine as a Google-opoly. It's hard to sympathize with a David as parasitic as Massa, but Slashdotters tend to be uneasy with Goliaths of any stripe, especially when their methods are kept secret.

And the real problem with Massa is that he's simply the termite Brin is able to see. There are thousands more behind the wall, invisibly boring away at the very structure of Google's house. "It's easy to become overly obsessed with those kinds of things," Brin admits.

It would make things a lot easier for Brin if the world's webmasters would just act as though his site didn't matter, but that's not human nature. There's no way around it - as long as Google remains the search engine of choice, the arms race between Google coders and the hordes of optimizers will go on.

V.

As proficient as Google is at revealing information, Brin is adept at keeping key morsels under wraps. In a way, that makes a lot of sense. Although the obvious image of Google is one of accumulation, the essence of data retrieval is just the opposite. Google is about division and subtraction, narrowing down billions of choices before revealing the most promising. Brin's world isn't as simple as visible equals good, hidden equals evil. Google's effectiveness as a search tool depends largely on how well it's able to shroud the site's inner workings from the commercial interests that clutter so much of the Internet today.

But here's the thing: If Brin thinks his job has become more difficult over the past year, it may soon become near impossible. In September, at the height of the China controversy, Google legal eagle Drummond spotted an article about the prospect of a Google IPO, which, the story said, might be the spark to ignite the dormant public offerings market. Drummond forwarded the story with some sardonic comments. In his office, Brin tries to find the email for me but can't. He notes the irony in that, and goes on to paraphrase the note: "Oh, OK, now we're going to reform the Chinese government - and on top of that, we're going to fix Wall Street."

Schmidt claims the company is in no rush to go public, but his appointment and the hiring of CFO George Rayes last August were unmistakable steps in that direction. When the IPO comes, it will bring riches - and more problems.

As a private company, Google has one master: users. As a public company, there are shareholders to worry about. And more than happy users, shareholders want ever-greater profits. Thus far, Brin and Page have succeeded in standing up to pressures that might compromise Google and the user experience. Google's influential stand against pop-up ads extends beyond its own domain - the company rejects advertisers whose links take Google users to pages that feature pop-ups. (AOL followed suit in October, announcing its own pop-up moratorium.) But when Google becomes a public company, shareholders might force the site to take a more amenable position, if the price is right. After all, for several years, Yahoo! refused to accept anything but fast-loading banner ads, claiming that it was looking out for users. That policy lasted until right about the time that the company's stock price began to cave.

Such pressure could cause Brin to rethink other policies, like his decision to refuse all alcohol and tobacco advertising. The fact that Google accepts advertising for adult content sites is an intriguing commentary on Brin's morality: Cigarettes and booze are evil; porn is not. It's a policy that would become progressively harder to defend were Google to go public. Then there's the Google cache to consider. Today's users love having access to a warehouse of information that was once published on the Internet but has since disappeared. Some information goes away for a reason, though. The cache could get Google in trouble, and Brin & Co. could soon find themselves facing all sorts of libel, defamation, or copyright lawsuits.

Increased competition may also cause Brin to do other things he's loath to do. So far, Google has gotten by without much in the way of competition from the other Internet superpowers. But in May, Yusuf Mehdi, the head of MSN, said he views Google as "more of a competitor than a partner" in the effort to become the default homepage on millions of browsers. What if, as Google.com solidifies its position as the focal point of the Internet, Yahoo! and AOL begin to rethink the millions in licensing fees they pay to what has become a top competitor? Brin may be forced to make the kind of concessions that he's thus far reserved for international governments.

The utilitarian manner in which Google has achieved its success has made it a sentimental favorite among the code-parsing set. Tech-community sites like Slashdot are almost uniformly pro-Google. Those with the temerity to bring lawsuits against Google ultimately feel the burn of online flames, watching their servers wither under the quasi-zealous wrath of thousands of engineers defending one of their own. But as Google is forced to make more concessions to realpolitik, its bonds with that idealistic constituency will inevitably continue to fray.

And without any sort of technological lock-in, it would be very easy for Google's visitors to simply start using other search engines. Fast Search & Transfer, based in Norway, boasts a 2.1 billion-page index at www.alltheweb.com , and its search engine works as quickly as Google's. What's more, it does a complete crawl of the Internet every 7 to 11 days compared with Google's 28 days. What if an influential group of politically active netizens makes a rousing case for boycotting Google on the grounds that it is anti-free speech and in cahoots with repressive governments? How long can a hugely powerful company that plays its decisions so close to the vest and refuses to justify itself publicly count on the devotion of the average information-hungry Web user?

It's inevitable that a company of Google's size and influence will have to compromise on purity. There's a chance that, in five years, Google will end up looking like a slightly cleaner version of what Yahoo! has become. There's also a chance that the site will be able to make a convincing case to investors that long-term user satisfaction trumps short-term profit. The leadership of the Internet is Sergey Brin's to lose. For now, at least, in Google we trust.

(Josh McHugh (josh@buzzkiller.net) wrote about Wi-Fi campus life in Wired 10.10.)