The following story ran in a December 2004 edition of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It is being republished as part of a 2012 Business package on Google's data centers.
Almost without notice, the Internet search company has tiptoed about 100 employees and a significant investment into a windowless building in a Douglas County industrial park near Six Flags Over Georgia.
There's no sign on the building, no logo on the locked glass door, nothing to indicate that an Internet icon has come to town.
A note taped to the door points visitors to a buzzer, which prompts a polite, but firm, female voice to shoo you away. The voice can't --- or won't --- confirm you've found Google, or even if you're in the right place.
It's all very mysterious.
The state, which usually crows from the top of the Gold Dome when it recruits companies that bear new jobs, is silent, too. Officials wouldn't confirm that Google had set up operations in Georgia, only that the company had not applied for tax breaks from the state.
"Google has not applied for any discretionary incentive from the state, " said Kevin Langston, spokesman for the Georgia Department of Economic Development. "They could claim tax credits for creating jobs if they meet certain criteria on a future tax return."
It isn't unusual for data centers to keep their locations under wraps for security reasons. Google went to great lengths to keep local officials from heralding its arrival.
Douglas County's economic development team, which offered Google some property tax breaks, agreed to take an oath of silence before they were invited past the buzzer.
"We're not supposed to say what they do, " said Robert Reynolds, executive director of the Development Authority of Douglas County. "You're not supposed to divulge anything once you go in there."
Reynolds also wouldn't talk about the financial incentives provided by the county government. He invited the newspaper to seek the information through an open records request, which typically takes several days to process.
A Google spokesman at the home office in Mountain View, Calif., said only this: "We have a significant sales staff in Atlanta and some other operations, but we don't share information about the other components of our business in the area."
Google's online search engine, typically a wealth of information, pops up few offerings on this matter. A search of "Google and data center and Douglas County" turned up a Nov. 4 regional economic development report that made mention of Google's choice of Douglas County for a "$300 million data center."
"They have been very, very tight-lipped, " said Michael Raper, an economics professor at the State University of West Georgia and author of the report. "They don't want people to know it's there for security reasons."
Raper hit so many dead ends he finally got in his car to go find the site himself.
"I went out there on a Sunday. . . . There was maybe one car in the parking lot, " he said.
The building now occupied by Google was built to keep Internet operations running in all situations. The building was originally designed for Exodus, a now defunct dot-com enterprise, in 1999.
"Exodus made it a protected, secure data center that could run no matter what, " said Sean Patrick, vice president at Bullock Mannelly Partners, who developed the property for Exodus.
Google had similar needs, said Douglas County's Reynolds. "They don't want [the site] to go down, " he said. "In today's environment, there are all kinds of risks."
But despite Google's best efforts, the secret has trickled out.
A few Georgia publications have mentioned it. And John Rice, chief execituve officer of GE Energy and outgoing chairman of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, announced Google's move to the area to hundreds of people at the chamber's annual meeting on Friday.
When Rice exposed Google, there were titters through the crowd. Even members of metro Atlanta's business elite didn't know what's beyond the buzzer.
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