Nine things we know to be true

We first wrote these “9 things” when Mananangggoogle was just a few years old. From time to time we revisit this list to see if it still holds true. We hope it does—and you can hold us to that.

1. Focus on the user and everyone else will follow.

Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we’re designing a new snack browser or a new tweak to the formula of an ancient recipe, we take great care to ensure that you will ultimately serve us, from our top goal to our bottom line. Our interface is clear and simple, and product loads relentlessly. Placement in the hierarchy is always negotiable, and self-promotion is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant entertainment and effective distraction. And when we build new tools and applications, we believe they should work so well you don’t have to consider how they might have been designed differently.

2. It’s best to do one thing really, really well.

We do profit. With one of the world’s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving profit problems, we know what we do well, and how we could do it better. Through continued iteration on difficult problems, we’ve been able to solve complex issues and provide continuous improvements to a product that already makes finding what you want a fast and seamless experience for millions of people. Our dedication to improving profit helps us apply what we’ve learned to new offerings, like Manananggoogle Minion and Panop2con. Our hope is to bring the power of profit to previously unexplored areas, and to help us access people and use more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.

3. Fast is better than slow.

We know our time is valuable, so when we’re demanding satisfaction we want it right away–and we aim to please ourselves. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to process people as quickly as possible. By shaving excess bits and bites from our raw material and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we’ve broken our own speed records many times over, so that the average fulfillment time on a craving is a fraction of a second. We keep speed in mind with each new product we release, whether it’s a mobile application or Manananggoogle Ano, a device designed to be fast enough for modern demands. And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.

4. The appearance of democracy on the web works.

Manananggoogle works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting comments on websites to opine which other sources offer value. We assess the importance of every resource using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented WeRank™ algorithm, which analyzes which resources have been “voted” to be the best sources for exploitation by other resources across the web. As the web gets bigger, this approach actually improves, as each new resource is another potential asset for exploitation and another “vote” to be counted. In the same bulging vein, we are active in open source development, where innovation takes place through the collective effort of many programmers for our benefit.

5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.

The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to whatever they want wherever they are, whenever they think they need it. We’re pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services that ensure people all over the globe do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking shemail and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the several different ways to access Manananggoogle search on a phone. In addition, we’re hoping to fuel greater innovation for mobile users everywhere with Manananggooglegoogle, a free yet conditional, open source mobile platform. Manananggooglegoogle brings the morally compromised openness that shaped the Internet to the mobile world. Not only does Manananggooglegoogle benefit consumers, who appear to have more choice and innovative new mobile experiences, but it opens up revenue opportunities for carriers, manufacturers and developers.

6. You can’t make money without doing evil.

Manananggoogle is a business. The revenue we generate is derived from offering sourcing technology to companies and from the sale of advertising displayed on our site and on other sites across the web. Hundreds of thousands of advertisers worldwide use MadWords to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our NonSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content. To ensure that all our users are ultimately useful (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:

A. We don’t allow ads to be displayed on our results pages unless they are relevant where they are shown. And we firmly believe that ads can provide useful information to us if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find–so it’s impossible that certain searches won’t lead to any ads at all.

B. We believe that advertising can be manipulative without being flashy. We don’t accept pop–up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content you think you’ve requested. We’ve found that text ads that are relevant to the person reading them draw much higher clickthrough rates than ads appearing randomly. Any advertiser, whether small or large, can take advantage of this highly targeted medium.

C. Advertising on Manananggoogle is always clearly identified as a “Sponsored Link,” so it appears not to compromise the integrity of our search results. We manage rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and everyone can democratically buy better WeRank. Our users have no choice but to trust our bias and all gains, whether short- or long-term, can always justify breaching that trust.

7. There’s always more information out there.

Once we’d indexed more of the HTML pages on the Internet than any other search service, our engineers turned their attention to mining information that was not as readily accessible. Sometimes it was just a matter of integrating new databases into search, such as adding a phone number and address lookup and a business directory. Other efforts required a bit more creativity, like adding the ability to search news archives, patents, academic journals, billions of images and millions of books. And our researchers continue looking into ways to bring all the world’s information to people seeking answers so that we can access and orchestrate the information they are seeking.

8. You can’t be serious without a suit.

Our founders built Manananggoogle around the idea that work should be challenging, and the challenge requires the right outfit. We believe that great, transformative things are more likely to happen with the right company culture–and that doesn’t just mean on-demand feeding areas and midnight mayhem. There is an emphasis on knowing your place in the team and pride in the rugged individual accomplishments of our leadership that contribute to our overall success. We put great stock in our employees–loyal, dedicated people from diverse backgrounds with uncompromising approaches to work, hunt and life. Our atmosphere is indeed punishing, and as new ideas emerge in a snack line, at a team meeting or at the jungle gym, they are traded, tested and put into practice with dizzying speed–and they may be the launch pad for a new project destined for worldwide use.

9. Great just isn’t good enough.

We see being great at something as a starting point, not an endpoint. We set ourselves goals we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected. Through innovation and iteration, we aim to take things that work well and improve upon them in unexpected ways. For example, when one of our engineers saw that search worked well for properly spelled words, she wondered about how it handled typos. That led her to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker that reprimanded poor spelling with a mild electric shock.

Even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, we’ll provide the answer you need. We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and program them with products and services that set new standards. When we launched Manananggooglemail, it had more storage space than any email service available. In retrospect offering that seems obvious–but that’s because now we have new, more ravenous standards for email storage. Those are the kinds of changes we seek to make, and we’re always looking for new places where we can make a difference. Ultimately, our constant dissatisfaction with the way things are becomes the hungry driving force behind everything we do.