Yahoogle
The final deadline was a week away.
The machines were built, the data centers filled. The crawler had worked. The indexer had worked. The pageranker had worked. Google had identified a billion URLs and now could search them. We had the superior technology. The Yahoo deal proved we had the business smarts to go with it. It was time to take our light from under its bushel and show it to the world.
At 2:59 a.m. on Monday, June 26, 2000, Cindy sat in her office, her fingers poised on the keyboard, waiting to hit Send. On her screen was a press release announcing that Google was now the largest search engine on the planet. A minute later, just in time to feed the gaping morning news maw on the East Coast, the message was on its way. Cindy gave the business and technology editors an hour to digest that tantalizing morsel, then served the pièce de résistance: a brief announcement that Google had signed a contract to replace Inktomi as the search technology provider for Yahoo. It was the biggest accomplishment in our company's short life.
The experts were underwhelmed.
"Analysts agreed that the announcement may have hurt Inktomi's pride," CNET reported, "but they said the implications for its revenues and profitability are mild ... That side of its business is a money loser that has increasingly played second fiddle to its exploding networking-services division. The search market in general, meanwhile, remains a low-margin, commodity business ... Dick Pierce, Inktomi's chief operating officer, said ... losing the portal as a search licensing partner ... will have 'little impact with respect to profitability.'"
Wall Street didn't buy the expert view. In fact, it sold heavily. By the end of the day, Inktomi's share price had fallen eighteen percent. This despite the fact that Yahoo had thrown Inktomi a bone, naming them a "corporate search" partner for an initiative launched the same day—because everyone knew the real money in search was on the corporate side.
With impeccable timing, I had planned my first vacation to coincide with the most momentous week in Google's history. Sunday night I had trouble falling asleep in our Lake Tahoe hotel, and on Monday I was up early flipping through the cable channels looking for news about the blockbuster Yahoogle deal as my family snuggled under their blankets. Much to my surprise, it wasn't the lead story on any of the major networks and, unbelievably, it didn't make headlines in the Tuesday papers. The San Francisco Chronicle had a brief mention in the business section and the Mercury News had slightly more, yet even that thin coverage signified that things had changed. Up to that point, the mainstream media had portrayed Google as another quirky startup and California cultural oddity, with an emphasis on the wacky ways of western entrepreneurs. Now, however, Google was a business-section item, suggesting that the company should be taken seriously as a corporate entity.
We didn't care what the press said. We knew it was a major win. The Googlers at the Plex celebrated accordingly. On Monday Charlie and his crew prepared a luau lunch and served it up al fresco. The grass was green and freshly mown, the food hot and plentiful, and the spirits high. Music filled the air and margaritas sloshed in paper cups hoisted in salute as Larry and Sergey, wearing plastic leis, introduced Yahoo co-founder David Filo. Filo eschewed the customary rhetorical pats on the back in favor of a brief speech that boiled down to, "Thank you. We have a lot to do. You should really get back to work." Perhaps his absent partner, Jerry Yang, was the party guy.
Susan Wojcicki handed out t-shirts she had secretly ordered proclaiming "Google and Yahoo got lucky"—Google's first official commemorative garment. If you want to make a killing trading tech stocks, find a friend in the t-shirt business between San Francisco and San Jose and ask to be alerted any time a rush order gets placed. Conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley states, "If it's not on a t-shirt, it didn't really happen."