October 9, 2007
Marissa Mayer, 32, Google’s vice president of search and user experience, who oversees many of the company’s most popular products including its Web search, Google Desktop, Google Maps, Google Earth and Google News. She recently spoke with Sentinel reporter Etan Horowitz at a product-development and management conference in Orlando.
Question: Explain Google’s informal motto, “Don’t Be Evil.”
Answer: Basically it means that we don’t think that you need to compromise your principles or your values in order to run a successful business. It’s the philosophy that we need to serve both our end users and our business partners in a way that is ethical.
Q: Beyond “Don’t Be Evil,” how would you define the Google culture?
A: A playful work environment. An environment where there’s a lot of creativity, a lot of empowerment, less management, more license and also things like 20 percent time.
Q: What is 20 percent time?
A: It’s a concept that you can spend one day a week working on whatever you want to work on. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a core project or something that the company is already working on. Some of our most useful products have come out of prototypes that we have built during 20 percent time.
Q: What are some tips for improving search queries?
A: Google operates based on keywords, so a lot of people will want to type in questions or concepts, and instead you should think of “What words would appear on the page I’m looking for?”
So, “disciplining my toddler” probably isn’t a great search. But something like “anger management toddlers” or “tantrum control” would be better to type in.
If you want things grouped, you can get them grouped by putting quotes around them.
Q: How can people get a result about themselves out of Google or pushed back?
A: If you have a legitimate or legal issue, you can file a complaint or you can work with the person that put that content on the Web to have it removed. Or you could just become more prolific.
One of the associates who works with me, for years the fact that she was on her high-school math team came up much to her horror and her dismay in her dating life. So she didn’t really want to be known as a Michigan all-star mathlete. So she began writing more blogs and participating more on the Web, and now she finally has displaced the all-star mathlete.
Q: How do you balance the innovation of things like Google Earth, Street View and Gmail with concerns about privacy?
A: Privacy has to do with trust. The really important thing to realize is how important trust is to Google, to our users and to the health of our business.
Search, which is the cornerstone of the business that we’ve built, is fundamentally a learning activity. And when you are learning something, you need to be able to trust the person you are learning it from — teachers, librarians.
Q: Is Google too powerful?
A: Google is a user-generated phenomenon. The strength that we have in our business is because users have found our products useful and have chosen to use them. If we had a breach of trust with our users or if our users really felt that they weren’t being well-served any longer, they would take their data and their usage elsewhere.
Q: What do you like best about working at Google?
A: I really like the people. I have told my bosses many times that I would work there even if they didn’t pay me.
There’s a line in High Fidelity where John Cusack turns to the camera and says, `I hired these guys for three days a week, and they just started showing up every day.’
I feel like I’m like those music-store geeks. I’d show up [at Google] every day and do what I was doing even if they didn’t pay me.
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