Inside the secret world of Google

In The Wall Street Journal, former Google brand manager Douglas Edwards dishes on the search giant's unpredictable early years

Google's U.K. headquarters in London
(Image credit: James Brittain/CORBIS)

Like many a tech giant, Google is notoriously secretive. But in a Wall Street Journal excerpt from the new book I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, Douglas Edwards, Google's first "brand manager," offers an exclusive window into life at the company during its early years. He dishes on his unorthodox job interview with Google co-founder Sergey Brin (Brin "bounced on a ball" and casually switched from English to Russian), revisits an ill-advised April Fool's joke that annoyed the search engine's users by claiming to read their minds and then delivering results in a foreign language, and reveals how the Google doodle came to be. Here, an excerpt:

One of the convictions that I brought with me to Google was that you needed to present your company's graphic signature in a monomaniacally consistent manner; to pound it into the public consciousness with a thousand tiny taps, each one exactly the same as the one before.

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