Acknowledgments

I was lucky long before I'd ever heard of Google.

My parents Marvin and Helene Edwards raised all their children with love and fairness, and instilled in us a desire to be upright and do good in the world. Not once have they wavered in their commitment to our happiness or hesitated to sacrifice to bring it about. When they could ill afford it, they helped fund my dreams and then gave me the confidence to pursue them. I can never repay the debt I owe them for their guidance, their patience, and their understanding.

My wife Kristen experienced all the pressures and insanity of a Silicon Valley startup without the compensating perks that I enjoyed. She didn't divorce me. For more than twenty-five years she has encouraged me, supported me, engaged me, and endured me. She is a ruthless editor and a stickler for facts. She has, on occasion, been the only reason I've remained sane. She is my best friend. "Gratitude" is an inadequate word for all I feel for her, but the end pages of a book about search technology hardly seem the place to delve deeper.

My children, Adam, Nathaniel, and Avalon, not only survived my frequent absences but became intelligent and accomplished beings despite my inattention. For that I thank them, as my guilt at being a negligent father is somewhat offset by their achievements. I hope that my becoming a more constant presence in their lives doesn't destroy the strong foundations upon which they have built such admirable success.

Many people deserve to be in this book but aren't. Some people are, but in a way that trivializes their contributions to Google's meteoric growth. I apologize to all who were truncated by the constraints of page limits or foreshortened because this tale is told from one marketer's perspective. You have earned recognition, and I hope this effort inspires others to publicly sing your praises.

To those Googlers and Xooglers who generously shared their time and their stories with me, I offer my deepest gratitude. Because of you, I understand more about Google now than I did when I was working in the Plex. I offer a special note of thanks to those who explained not once, not twice, but many, many times the complicated systems I still may have managed to mangle in these pages. Any such errors are clearly of my own making and not the fault of those who attempted to impart technological insights to a nontechnical mind.

Among that number are Gerald Aigner, Anurag Archarya, Mieke Bloomfield, Paul Bucheit, Orkut Buyukkotten, Bay Wei Chang, Matt Cutts, Jeff Dean, Ron Dolin, Sanjay Ghemawat, Ben Gomes, Urs Hölzle, Zain Kahn, Salar Kamangar, Ed Karrels, Deb Kelly, Keith Kleiner, Ross Konigstein, Chad Lester, Jane Manning, Amit Patel, Jim Reese, Larry Schwimmer, Ray Sidney, Craig Silverstein, Shawn Simpson, Ben Smith, Eric Veach, and Will Whitted.

Howard Gobioff would be on that list, had he not passed away in 2008. Howard was bright, funny, and full of opinions he happily shared. I respected his acumen and his principles and was saddened by the loss of his talent and his humor.

Those who provided much appreciated perspective on our business-side systems and our corporate culture include Charlie Ayers, Heather Cairns, Devin Ivester, Katina Johnson, Jim Kolotouros, David Krane, Alan Louie, Miriam Rivera, George Salah, Sheryl Sandberg, Stacy Sullivan, and Susan Wojcicki.

Sincere thanks also to Cindy McCaffrey for sticking her neck out to hire me, when clearly my academic credentials were marginal at best, and then for helping me survive in the maelstrom of daily life at Google for more than five years. It was a joy standing with her to keep the marketing fires burning while the wolves howled just outside the light. She inspired and supported me and always lived up to her promise: "My door is always open. Except when it's closed."

Larry Page and Sergey Brin must also be acknowledged here for handing me a ticket to the most amazing ride I will probably ever experience. Had they changed the way I thought about work, expanded my assessment of my own capabilities, or altered my view of global communication, it would have been enough for me. But they did all that while creating a new technology that reshaped the way everyone thinks about everything. To quote Larry, "Kewl."

To my friends Andy and Lita Unruh, Jan Kerans, and Al and Joanne Riske for enduring the teeth gnashing and mood swings while I struggled to churn out more pages, to my in-laws Maggi and Merritt for tiptoeing around the house so as not to disturb the creative process, to my siblings Jeff and Carolyn for their restraint in not asking me constantly about my progress, to Emily Wood of Google PR for scheduling interviews and shepherding me to them and Karen Wickre for her thoughtful comments and gentle encouragement to stake out my own narrative, to my agent Amy Rennert and my editors George Hodgman, Tom Bouman, and Camille Smith—to all who have helped me get this story out of my head and into print—I extend my true and heartfelt appreciation.

And to those who have read this book and are left with questions about how to get a job at Google, how to improve a site's ranking in Google results, or how to share a great idea for a new Google service, I invite you check out the same helpful resource I would use now that I've been away from the company for half a decade. You can find it at www.Google.com.