Business Week Online, 15th December 2008
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Google's** Mayer: Staying Innovative In a Downturn
{text:bookmark-start} {text:bookmark-end} The mantra that's been flooding the Googleplex* this year?* 'Scarcity brings clarity,' explains Marissa Mayer, Google** Vice-President
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin co-founded Google 10 years ago, few people imagined the kind of influence it would wield today — not just on the Internet, but increasingly in such established industries as media and software.
Since then, Google has come to dominate the most lucrative piece of online advertising: the text ads placed next to its search results. Armed by an expansive mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," the company has used its rapidly growing profits to fund forays into online software applications and even radio and television advertising. No wonder Google shows up as one of the 10 names on BusinessWeek's list of the World's Most Influential Companies
In a recent interview with Silicon Valley bureau chief Robert Hof, Marissa Mayer, vice-president of search products and user experience, shared some little-known tales of Google's earliest years.
How has Google become so influential, in your view?
Google is fueled by user choice. We can't rest on our laurels. We know users can pick someone else. When the end-user is happy, they click on more ads, and they really participate with advertisers. Our commitment is to make sure the ad services we offer improve our products and don't erode the user experience.
When I was an engineer, I created an experiment called "no ads at all," where a percentage of users didn't get ads at all. We left that experiment running for five years. Finally, after I moved on to other jobs, people came to me and said, "Can we shut it off?" I said before we shut it off, we should go and get the data. It turned out that users who got ads were happier than users who...