Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo! by Carlson Nicholas

Author:Carlson, Nicholas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics / General
ISBN: 9781455556625
Publisher: Hachette Book Group
Published: 2014-12-18T16:00:00+00:00

Almost from the start of the Universal Search project, Singhal and Mayer didn’t get along.

The surface issue that the two disagreed over most was: Should Google allow only algorithms to determine the ranking of its search results, as Singhal argued? Or should Google sometimes use human editors to curate its results, as Mayer argued?

To make her case, Mayer’s favorite example was a search query for “suicidal thoughts.” Using purely algorithmic ranking, Google did not bring up the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Mayer felt the number should obviously be included, and near the top of the page. Why shouldn’t Google just include it? Shouldn’t Google serve up the best results, even if they had to be included manually?

The very idea of it infuriated Singhal. Surely Mayer realized her editorial results would never scale the way his algorithmic results could.

The debate played out vocally in product-review and launch-calendar meetings in gray conference rooms in building 43 on Google’s campus. For years, Mayer had dominated those meetings, but in Singhal, she encountered someone who had an ego to match hers. Like Mayer, Singhal felt supported by Google’s higher-ups, and he would not back down.

Singhal and Mayer would sometimes argue through proxies. The product managers on Mayer’s staff would spout her talking points, and then the engineers on Singhal’s would respond with his. For many on both staffs, it felt like a war between sects of the Google faithful—the algorithmic orthodox versus the editorially reformed.

Even more than Mayer’s arguments for including editorial results, Singhal loathed how, when his team was ready to roll out a change, Mayer would insist it pass through her UI review—a process that could take weeks.

Ultimately, the contest between Singhal and Mayer was not over any one issue. It was about authority.

Singhal—and Manber, too—believed that the engineers who created the hard-core technology powering Google search could more than handle user interface design. How hard could it be to draw mock-ups? Not as hard as developing an algorithm. Ultimately, Singhal and Manber wanted engineering to own the Google product. They felt the product would improve faster if they didn’t have Mayer bottlenecking the whole process.

Mayer, meanwhile, felt that she was the one coming up with brilliant products—like the idea for Universal Search way back in 2001. Why shouldn’t she have direct control over Google’s engineering resources to implement what she wanted to do?

In his many years running large technology organizations, Coughran had seen this kind of battle for power over and over. There was a natural tension between product management and engineering. At Google, this tension was intentionally fostered. Larry Page had always preferred to run the company by setting up heated debates between his direct reports so he could hear both sides of an issue and then pick his way forward.

And for a few years, Coughran and Google’s two cofounders managed the battle between Singhal and Mayer in the same way. Maybe they would pick a single leader for the product someday, but not yet.

Then, in 2010, Larry Page decided that Google was moving too slowly.

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