Today it might seem that Google’s power and success were inevitable — thanks to Larry Page and Sergey Brin cracking the search code — but the reality is quite different. Google was born in a state of war in the early 2000s, subject to the whims of Microsoft, a tech goliath whose Internet Explorer browser was on 90 percent of all computers at the time and essentially controlled most people’s access to Google’s search engine. And even though Google won that battle, it’s faced new ones ever since. 

In the second episode of Land of the Giants: The Google Empire — our new seven-part podcast about the company’s ascent to a global behemoth — we examine how Google, which is currently being sued by the Department of Justice and several state attorneys general over antitrust issues, has had to fight for survival throughout its existence.

Google reached its current heights only by adopting a survivalist mentality — first clawing its way to sustained relevance, and then eventually to dominance in areas like search and mobile operating systems. The company’s early fear of failure still seems visible in many of its current decisions, such as when it pays competitors (like Apple) to make it their operating system’s default search engine, or when it fills its search results with its own products. 

Google’s survivalist story begins at a time when Internet Explorer reigned supreme and Microsoft could have easily displaced Google as its browser’s default search option. Back then, you didn’t type search queries in your browser’s address bar. To search with Google, you’d either type www.google.com in the address bar or hit the browser’s “search” button (which took you to Google’s webpage). Microsoft, if it so desired, could build its own search engine and make that the default, or it could enable search in the address bar with something other than Google. If Microsoft had done something like that, it likely would have been the end of Google. So Google knew it needed a workaround. 

That workaround was Google’s Toolbar, a browser extension that added a Google search bar right under the browser’s address bar. A few years after Google released it, hundreds of millions of people were using Toolbar, thanks largely to Google signing distribution deals with companies like Adobe to put it in their install packages, and also its ease of use. Google, for a moment, felt like it solved its problem. 

But as Google started developing other web-based programs that would become core products, like Gmail, Docs, and Calendar, the notion of allowing another company — especially a competitor like Microsoft — to control people’s experience of the web made Google uneasy. Google saw Microsoft developing its own search engine, first called Live Search and then called Bing, and decided it could not rely on its Toolbar alone to encourage people to use Google search over competitors. The company needed its own browser. That’s what led it to create Chrome. 

Google Chrome took off because it was fast, simple, and easy to use, and also because Google used similar distribution deals from Toolbar to push it out to the masses. But while Chrome was a smashing success — it’s now the dominant desktop browser in the world — it provided only momentary relief. Because just as Chrome established itself on desktop, the mobile revolution took off, leaving Google exposed yet again in a new area.  

Google didn’t want another company — whether it was Microsoft or Apple — controlling how people accessed the web and its products from their phones and other handheld devices. It also knew it would benefit from some sort of standardization of the mobile web. And that became the foundation for Android, the mobile operating system it acquired in 2005 and developed inside its company. Today, Android powers almost 85 percent of the world’s phones, meaning Google is the pathway to the web for most people, not simply a website where you go to find stuff. 

Without Android and Chrome, Google, “would have been relegated to probably irrelevance,” Brian Rakowski, a Google VP of product management who works on both Chrome and Google’s mobile efforts told us. “We probably would have been either stamped out or a very, very tiny, probably becoming irrelevant company if we weren’t able to.”

All these battles got Google, once a scrappy startup trying to not get crushed by Microsoft, to where it is today — at the top of the tech world, but also facing allegations that it’s grown too big and is illegally stifling competition. 

For more stories about Google’s incredible rise, covering everything from the mobile phone wars to the company’s internal tensions to its current antitrust battles, subscribe now to Land of the Giants: The Google Empire. And please tell us what you think: We’re on Twitter at @kantrowitz and @shiringhaffary.

Silicon Valley is full of lofty ideals. But few are as lofty as Google’s most famous motto: “Don’t be evil.”

If you know anything about Google’s culture, you’ve probably heard those three words. They’re catchy. Quotable. Even mockable. “Don’t be evil” was at the top of the company’s code of conduct for over a decade, seeing the company through its exponential rise from scrappy startup to tech giant. 

The ideal is legendary. And its origin story is particularly telling about what Google was when it started — and the controversies surrounding the company today.

In the first episode of Land of the Giants: The Google Empire — our new seven-part podcast about Google’s ascent to a global behemoth — Marissa Mayer, one of Google’s earliest and most influential executives, and now co-founder of the startup Sunshine, told us how the company embraced “don’t be evil.” 

Mayer says the idea of “Don’t be evil” came about when Google began making deals to monetize its search engine in the late ’90s. An early business meeting with the Washington Post raised excitement among Google’s engineers but also some trepidation. In particular, Mayer told us, one engineer named Amit Patel had serious doubts.

“He was worried that [we] might tell the Washington Post that we’ll put an article that they think is more important first in the search results or not be as comprehensive if they didn’t want us to be. Things that he really viewed would compromise our integrity.” (Remember, at the time, Google’s whole goal for itself was to “organize the world’s information.”) A representative for Google could not confirm details of the meeting, but said that the company would never change search results because of a partner. 

And so, says Mayer, Patel went into the conference room where the Google team was going to meet with the Washington Post and wrote a message to his co-workers on the whiteboard “in the lower left-hand corner … in tiny little letters, ‘don’t be evil.’” 

The line clearly resonated, because later, Mayer and some other longtime employees were tasked with coming up with an official code of conduct for the company. Mayer recalls that Paul Buchheit (a legendary Google engineer who would later come up with Gmail) brought back Patel’s note. “[Paul] said, can we just dispense with this exercise? We have our core value. It’s what Amit wrote on the whiteboard; it’s ‘don’t be evil.’”

Buccheit told us he remembers the series of events slightly differently. He said he remembers first coming up with the “don’t be evil” saying during a meeting about core company values, and that afterwards Patel started writing “don’t be evil” around Google’s headquarters. But Buccheit also said he shared an office with Mayer and Patel at the time, so it’s possible Patel first “implanted” the mantra in Buccheit’s mind, in an “inception type scenario.” This all happened over 20 years ago, so it makes sense the grand “don’t be evil” origin story has a couple different variations, depending who you talk to. What matters though, is that the idea stuck. 

“Don’t be evil” quickly became part of Google’s identity, internally and to the outside world. It represented a new kind of ethos for a future corporate powerhouse, one that would help shape the culture of Silicon Valley and the many tech companies that formed in the past 20 years. Google was meant to be innovating technology to make the world a better place. 

In Google’s early days, applying the mantra of don’t be evil was simple: Don’t let advertisers buy their way to the top of search results, don’t charge people to find information, don’t spam people with banner ads on the homepage.  

Today, Google’s ability to fulfill that promise of not being evil is a lot more complicated. 

As Google has grown from a small operation with a single tool — search — into a global behemoth with hundreds of products, from Gmail to Google Maps to YouTube, that all have immense influence over how we communicate and discover information, people have started questioning whether Google is too big. They’re also scrutinizing whether the decisions it makes are harming the rest of us as it fulfills the corporate demand to make more profits. 

In the fall of 2020, the US Department of Justice and several state attorneys general filed three separate antitrust lawsuits against Google. The suits charge that Google holds monopoly power in online search and digital ad technology, and it is using that power to stifle competition. 

At the same time, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are also mad at Google — and other major tech companies — for different reasons. Some politicians think the company isn’t doing enough in taking down misinformation about things like Covid-19 or the 2020 election on its platforms. Other politicians allege the company is already doing too much and stifling partisan speech, like when Google’s YouTube recently suspended Donald Trump’s account for inciting violence in the wake of the capitol riots. It’s a reminder that “don’t be evil” can mean different things to different people. 

Even within Google’s own workforce, we see tension around what the company stands for. In November 2018, 20,000 Google employees staged a walkout to protest the company’s handling of several high-profile sexual harassment claims, which revealed a host of internal conflicts, from objections about expanding Google’s business to accusations of a retaliatory culture against employees who speak out or try to unionize.

It can seem hard to reconcile all this outrage about Google with the idea that Google was supposed to be the happiest of the tech giants. The one with the bright colorful logo, the clever doodles, the culture of innovation and excellence. And the do-good mantra.

“Google doesn’t always do the right thing,” Dana Wagner, who served as Google’s antitrust lawyer from 2007 to 2011, told us. That’s because, Wagner said, “Sometimes it’s not clear what the right thing is.”

In 2018, Google quietly moved “don’t be evil” to the very end of its code of conduct. But it’s still there: “And remember … don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right — speak up.”  To the Google employees, politicians, and users who still hold Google to that standard — whatever their interpretation of it may be — those three words still matter. 

For more stories about Google’s incredible rise, covering everything from the mobile phone wars to the company’s internal tensions to its current antitrust battles, subscribe now to Land of the Giants: The Google Empire. And please tell us what you think: We’re on Twitter at @shiringhaffary and @kantrowitz.

It’s hard to imagine the internet today without Google.

From search to YouTube to Android to Google Maps, billions of us rely on its products every single day. Google is reliable, simple, and most of its products don’t cost money to use. We use it without even thinking about it when we open our web browser or pick up our phone.

The Silicon Valley giant is so powerful that the US government is accusing it of being a monopoly. Politicians as well as the public have begun questioning if the company exerts too much control over how we find information online. Data privacy advocates worry that Google collects too much information about our digital lives. And some of the company’s own rank-and-file employees have even staged a rebellion, demanding more of a say in key decisions about how the company does business.

But it wasn’t always this way. Google’s rise was anything but inevitable. In fact, in the late ’90s, when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin started the company at the same time they were graduate students known for rollerblading down the halls of Stanford’s computer science department, it was hard to get anyone to take them seriously. And even after Google proved the skeptics wrong by coming up with a better way to navigate the internet, the company had to fight at every turn to remain relevant.

In this season of Vox Media’s Land of the Giants podcast series, we’re telling the story of Google’s great innovations, its battles with fellow tech giants like Apple and Microsoft, and how it is grappling with organizing the world’s information in 2021 — when the very nature of what is fact and what is false is up for debate.

We talked to Google’s current leaders, early employees, proponents, and critics to look at how Google became such an important part of our lives. And we examine how a company whose key corporate motto used to be “don’t be evil” is facing accusations internally and externally that it’s strayed from that path as it’s grown its business.

The first episode of Land of the Giants: The Google Empire comes out on February 16. You can find it on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to the trailer below.