The 10 principles that made Google great
How Google defined its DNA as the company that changed the internet.
Every extremely successful company has guiding principles.
Beliefs that shape the culture, decisions, but most importantly, the ambitions of a company.
Today, how many companies take the time to define these principles clearly?
And, even more importantly, how many hold themselves accountable to these principles as they grow?
One company that immediately comes to mind is Amazon.
They are famous for their Leadership Principles (LP).
At their best, these principles have been used to guide hiring decisions, influence how resources are allocated, and define how careers progress inside the company.
More importantly, these principles make one thing very clear: what gets rewarded, and what doesn’t.
One of my favorite is their “Customer Obsession” LP, which states:
Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
Funny story: two years ago I interviewed a former Amazon VP, Ethan Evans, who actually wrote part of the “Ownership” Leadership Principle, and particularly the words “an owner never says that’s not my job”1.
Below to read my interview with Ethan Evans:
Google
But today I want to talk about Google and its principles, because they took a different approach.
Early on, they set out 10 core principles.
Principles that became the foundation for how Google operated and innovated.
These ideas went to shape not only their products, but the Internet as we know it2.
May 3rd, 2026: Google is the second most valuable company on Earth.
Which is interesting, because just a year ago, the narrative was very different:
“Search is dead”
“Gemini is bad”
Then came their latest results (financial results for Q1 2026):
Revenues increased 22% YoY
Google Cloud +63% YoY
Search Revenues +19% YoY
The picture looks very different. But, hey, I’m not a financial analyst.
And I’m not here to give investing advice.
I am only interested in what sits underneath these numbers. So let’s go back to the 10 principles.
I found these to be extremely fascinating, and I think you’ll enjoy too.
1. Focus on the user and all else will follow.
Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible.
Whether we’re designing a new internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line.
Our homepage interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly.
Placement in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting3.
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 search.
With one of the world’s largest research groups focused exclusively on solving search 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 service that already makes finding information a fast and seamless experience for millions of people.
Our dedication to improving search helps us apply what we’ve learned to new products, like Gmail and Google Maps.
Our hope is to bring the power of search to previously unexplored areas, and to help people access and use even more of the ever-expanding information in their lives.
3. Fast is better than slow.
We know your time is valuable, so when you’re seeking an answer on the web you want it right away - and we aim to please.
We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our website as quickly as possible.
By shaving excess bits and bytes from our pages and increasing the efficiency of our serving environment, we’ve broken our own speed records many times over, so that the average response time on a search result is a fraction of a second.
We keep speed in mind with each new product we release, whether it’s a mobile application or Google Chrome, a browser designed to be fast enough for the modern web. And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.
4. Democracy on the web works.
Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value.
We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been “voted” to be the best sources of information by other pages across the web.
As the web gets bigger, this approach actually improves, as each new site is another point of information and another vote to be counted.
In the same vein, we are active in open source software development, where innovation takes place through the collective effort of many programmers.
5. You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are, whenever they need it.
We’re pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services that help people all over the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking email and calendar events to watching videos, not to mention the several different ways to access Google search on a phone.
In addition, we’re hoping to fuel greater innovation for mobile users everywhere with Android, an open source mobile platform free of charge.
Android brings the openness that shaped the internet to the mobile world.
Not only does Android benefit consumers, who have more choice and innovative new mobile experiences, but it opens up revenue opportunities for carriers, manufacturers and developers.
6. You can make money without doing evil.
Google is a business.
The revenue we generate is derived from offering search 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 Google Ads to promote their products; hundreds of thousands of publishers take advantage of our AdSense program to deliver ads relevant to their site content.
To ensure that we’re ultimately serving all our users (whether they are advertisers or not), we have a set of guiding principles for our advertising programs and practices:
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 if, and only if, they are relevant to what you wish to find–so it’s possible that certain searches won’t lead to any ads at all.
We believe that advertising can be effective without being flashy. We don’t accept pop–up advertising, which interferes with your ability to see the content 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.
Advertising on Google is always clearly identified as a “Sponsored Link”, so it does not compromise the integrity of our search results. We never manipulate rankings to put our partners higher in our search results and no one can buy better PageRank. Our users trust our objectivity and no short-term gain could ever 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 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.
8. The need for information crosses all borders.
Our company was founded in California, but our mission is to facilitate access to information for the entire world, and in every language.
To that end, we have offices in more than 60 countries, maintain more than 180 internet domains, and serve more than half of our results to people living outside the United States.
We offer Google’s search interface in more than 130 languages, offer people the ability to restrict results to content written in their own language, and aim to provide the rest of our applications and products in as many languages and accessible formats as possible.
Using our translation tools, people can discover content written on the other side of the world in languages they don’t speak. With these tools and the help of volunteer translators, we have been able to greatly improve both the variety and quality of services we can offer in even the most far–flung corners of the globe.
9. You can be serious without a suit.
Our founders built Google around the idea that work should be challenging, and the challenge should be fun.
We believe that great, creative things are more likely to happen with the right company culture–and that doesn’t just mean lava lamps and rubber balls.
There is an emphasis on team achievements and pride in individual accomplishments that contribute to our overall success.
We put great stock in our employees–energetic, passionate people from diverse backgrounds with creative approaches to work, play and life. Our atmosphere may be casual, but as new ideas emerge in a café line, at a team meeting or at the 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.
10. 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, he wondered about how it handled typos. That led him to create an intuitive and more helpful spell checker.
Even if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, finding an answer on the web is our problem, not yours.
We try to anticipate needs not yet articulated by our global audience, and meet them with products and services that set new standards.
When we launched Gmail, it had more storage space than any email service available. In retrospect offering that seems obvious, but that’s because now we have new 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 driving force behind everything we do.
Google Principles for AI
More recently, Google has also shared its AI Principles.
They believe their approach on AI should be bold and responsible.
“Bold in rapidly innovating and deploying AI in groundbreaking products used by and benefiting people everywhere, contributing to scientific advances that deepen our understanding of the world, and helping humanity address its most pressing challenges and opportunities. And responsible in developing and deploying AI that addresses both user needs and broader responsibilities, while safeguarding user safety, security, and privacy.”
More specifically, these are their 3 core AI principles:
Bold Innovation
We develop AI that assists, empowers, and inspires people in almost every field of human endeavor; drives economic progress; and improves lives, enables scientific breakthroughs, and helps address humanity’s biggest challenges.
Developing and deploying models and applications where the likely overall benefits substantially outweigh the foreseeable risks.
Advancing the frontier of AI research and innovation through rigorous application of the scientific method, rapid iteration, and open inquiry.
Using AI to accelerate scientific discovery and breakthroughs in areas like biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, and mathematics.
Focusing on solving real world problems, measuring the tangible outcomes of our work, and making breakthroughs broadly available, enabling humanity to achieve its most ambitious and beneficial goals.
Responsible development and deployment
Because we understand that AI, as a still-emerging transformative technology, poses evolving complexities and risks, we pursue AI responsibly throughout the AI development and deployment lifecycle, from design to testing to deployment to iteration, learning as AI advances and uses evolve.
Implementing appropriate human oversight, due diligence, and feedback mechanisms to align with user goals, social responsibility, and widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.
Investing in industry-leading approaches to advance safety and security research and benchmarks, pioneering technical solutions to address risks, and sharing our learnings with the ecosystem.
Employing rigorous design, testing, monitoring, and safeguards to mitigate unintended or harmful outcomes and avoid unfair bias.
Promoting privacy and security, and respecting intellectual property rights.
Collaborative progress, together
We make tools that empower others to harness AI for individual and collective benefit.
Developing AI as a foundational technology capable of driving creativity, productivity, and innovation across a wide array of fields, and also as a tool that enables others to innovate boldly.
Collaborating with researchers across industry and academia to make breakthroughs in AI, while engaging with governments and civil society to address challenges that can’t be solved by any single stakeholder.
Fostering and enabling a vibrant ecosystem that empowers others to build innovative tools and solutions and contribute to progress in the field.
Conclusion
The real test of any company’s principles is whether they survive success. Not whether they sound good or cool.
Looking ahead, the stakes are only getting higher.
We’re entering a world shaped by AI, where decisions made today will define how billions of people access information, make choices, and understand reality.
And in that world, some of the principles above are safeguards:
Focus on the user
Make things fast and accessible
Earn trust, don’t exploit it
Push boundaries, but responsibly
The hope is simple: that these principles don’t become a relic of the past,
or a page buried somewhere on a corporate website.
The hope is that they remain alive, challenged, debated, and applied.
Because if they do, they’ll help shape the future of innovation itself - like Google did almost 30 years ago.
See you all on Sundays 🗓️
Thanks,
Giacomo
Here you can find the newsletter post where Ethan talks about writing the Ownership Leadership Principle.
About that, read my newsletter post about how conversational AI is three times more persuasive than traditional ads.