They established a philanthropic arm, Google.org, and recruited an esteemed epidemiologist and world health expert, Dr. Larry Brilliant, to run it. They pledged to divert to this foundation one percent of Google’s profits, with three goals: to ascertain the quality of water and health care and other services country by country; to gather enough information to try to predict and prevent catastrophes, whether these be forces of nature or disease; and to make energy-renewable investments. Page and Brin sound more like social workers than hardheaded businessmen when they extol Google Earth as a vehicle to spot imminent disasters and offer to make “a gift” of this technology to disaster relief organizations. Google put up thirty million dollars to fund the X Prize Foundation’s Google Lunar X Prize, which would be awarded to the private team that designs the best robotic rover to traverse the moon’s surface and send high definition video images back to earth.

Google also launched Google Health, an effort much like the one announced by Microsoft and by AOL cofounder Steve Case’s Revolution Health Group LLC. Each aimed to give citizens a safe place to store health records online and share them with doctors, and search for the best medical advice online. Google recruited Dr. Roni Zeiger, a primary care physician who returned to Stanford for an advanced degree in medical informatics, hoping to devise ways to democratize medical information. He joined Google in January 2006, after a typically rigorous interview. “They asked for my high school grades!” Zeiger laughed. He was dead serious about his mission. “Google gets more health questions than anyone on the planet,” he said. Zeiger realized that “Google’s skills could help people organize their own health information.” He vowed, “We’ll never sell anyone’s health records.” And in a March 2008 speech, Eric Schmidt promised to keep the site free of all advertising.

There is a shared, and perhaps blinding, belief on the Google campus that Google was altruistic, an attitude reflected in “Don’t be evil.” On a stage he shared with Page at the Global Philanthropy Forum after Google embraced the slogan, Brin declared that ‘“don’t be evil’ serves as a reminder to our employees,” but it “was a mistake. It should really say, ’Be Good.‘”

One can interpret Brin’s remarks as a reflection of his idealism, or his naïveté-or both. To simply say a corporation should be good ignores the range of choices a company is compelled to make in conducting its business. How “good” was Google when it complied with German laws not to disseminate Nazi literature? Google’s searches were following German law, which is good. It was censoring search results, which is bad. When in 2008 Google closed its Phoenix office and laid off a handful of employees because the company did not believe the office was essential, it was being good to shareholders. But those employees most certainly did not see Google’s action as good.

BUT THE SPEED OF GOOGLE’S ascent and its expansive commercial ambitions came to overshadow its noble ambitions. Google grew up very fast. In their first annual letter to shareholders, in 2004, Page and Brin wrote of Google: “If it were a person, it would have started elementary school late last summer, and today it would have just finished the first grade.” Three years later, Search Engine Land ’s Danny Sullivan thought Google had prematurely entered its awkward teenage years. “The story of Google today is perhaps the adolescent period they are going through. How do they deal with the challenges of the growth they are going through? You are going to go through this wave of people leaving Google. They don’t need to work there anymore. And it’s not going to be fun, which will change the culture.”

“Google’s become a big company,” said Paul Buchheit, who left Google in 2006 to start Friendfeed.com. “It’s a very different environment.” As with most big companies, he said “priorities become based more on what looks good internally. You become distant from the users. When you get bigger, some engineer comes up with this crazy project, but he’s four or five layers from Larry. These layers in between are going to serve up all sorts of weird barriers.” There’s little incentive, he said, for individuals to innovate because the bureaucracy becomes cautious, overwhelmed with a terror “not to look dumb.” Asked for a more concrete example, the engineer who distilled Google into a powerfully simple slogan retreats to this sweeping analogy: “It’s an entire system. Think about the Soviet Union. They had lots of brilliant people. But there was an economic system there that encouraged certain kinds of behavior. They failed to innovate because the system was wrong.” Buchheit’s critique is echoed by Scott Heiferman, CEO and cofounder of the social network site Meetup.com, who has hired some former Googlers who left the company because it got too big. “Google did not invent YouTube. They tried and failed with Google Video. Google did not invent Facebook. They tried and failed with Orkut.” Aside from search, Heiferman said, “Google has actually failed at most things.”

Ask Google executives to describe their biggest future concern, and more often than not they say size. Growing too big and losing focus is Omid Kordestani’s foremost worry. At Netscape, he said, the company drifted away from founder Jim Clark’s vision of it as a company whose browser enabled Internet communication. “Suddenly we became more of an enterprise company than a Web company, even though we started the browser.” When Netscape rushed too quickly to issue an IPO in 1995, he said, pressure was on to generate more revenues, to perform on a very public stage for the press, to “focus on quarter to quarter” performance.

“For the last year my biggest worry was scaling the business,” Schmidt said in May 2007. “The problem is we’re growing so quickly. When you bring in people so quickly there’s always the possibility you’ll lose the formula. How do you manage engineering teams that are not on one campus? How do you manage across time zones? How do you keep the culture?”

IN ADDITION TO the natural concerns with rapid growth, critics both inside and outside Google believe the company has real management weaknesses. Paul Buchheit believes Google has succumbed to the disease of bigness that he says afflicts “every big company” and has become bureaucratic. There are many bottlenecks at Google. A former Google executive criticizes “micro management at the top,” and said a prime example is that the founders and Schmidt, or their designees, “have to sign off on each hire. That’s OK when you are hiring five new employees.” In 2007 and early 2008, Google was hiring 150 people per week. Because most decisions about new employees, deals, or policy “have to go to the top,” the process is slowed. Echoing a common thought, an executive who is a Google corporate ally and works closely with them said, “In many ways, it’s a very disorganized company. It looks to me like they are caught in this interesting conflict between a company that is overmanaged and undermanaged. They have a control mechanism at the top that has inordinate control. And at the same time, there is too much freedom.” He lists two complaints: “You can’t get answers out of Google when you want to schedule something,” so there are long waits. And “they are structured to allow way too many people to participate,” which results in endless meetings.

The founders get diverted by issues that should not require their attention. Eric Schmidt described a Monday management committee meeting in March 2008 during which they discussed how, under California labor laws, a review was necessary to determine whether their many massage therapists should become full-time employees. The significant plus was that they would receive full benefits. The significant minus was that tipping would be prohibited. The issue had first been raised at the TGIF meeting the previous Friday. The founders, massage regulars, were agitated. Schmidt, who said he has “never had a massage at Google, and never will,” was impatient, and blurted, “You guys are in charge of this.”