Google has lost another employee to Facebook: Eliot Schrage, the company's VP of global communications and public affairs.

Schrage will become Facebook's new VP of communications and public policy. He joins several other former Googlers at Facebook, including Sheryl Sandberg, who left her job as Google's VP of global online sales and operations in March to become Facebook's new COO.

Schrage spoke with InformationWeek last September for a story about Google's public relations strategy that never really came together.

The original thesis of the piece, that Google's unique approach to public relations had helped it in its meteoric rise, proved to be difficult to support.

After interviewing several public relations professionals, the consensus seemed to be that while Google handled public relations admirably, the company's impact on communications and public relations had more to do with how search engines influence the accessibility of information than with how Google's specific public relations practices influenced other communications professionals.

"Search engines have changed public image and corporate reputation dramatically," said Steve Rubel, senior VP in Edelman's Me2Revolution Group who runs the popular Micro Persuasion blog. "And I think what PR professionals do day to day in their jobs has not caught up with that yet. Search engines probably have a bigger impact on brand and corporate reputation than any other force in the world. The minute anybody anywhere gets interested in something, unless it's really an impulse purchase or it's something they're going to buy without much research, they're going to go on Google -- or any search engine for that matter -- and research it.

"Based on that they're going to make a decision," Rubel continued. "And that has a bigger impact on brand reputation than anything out there. With all due respect to you guys, an article in the press impacts reputation in a tremendous way, but that's one moment in time, and there can be another story the next day or a week later or what not. And Google remembers everything."

"I don't think the 'whole world' looks at Google" for guidance on PR, said Renee Blodgett, president of Blodgett Communications, in an e-mail. "Sure, it's a giant and people pay attention, but it doesn't make sense to model your whole PR program around what Google does, as much as it didn't make sense to model your whole PR program around what Microsoft did 10 years ago."

Nonetheless, Schrage when interviewed made some interesting points about how Google's corporate culture influenced its communications policy and practices.

"We made a strategic decision shortly after I arrived that our modus operandi, the driving force behind our communication efforts, would be the principle of transparency," said Schrage. "We found that the benefits of being more clear about what we were doing, or at least the principles underlying what we were doing, outweighed the potential competitive disadvantages of being more clear and more direct.

"Of course, at the margins we don't tell everybody always what we're doing, because there are competitive concerns and confidentiality concerns," Schrage said. "But I think anyone looking at the company today would say that we're much more open about our plans and directions than we were two years ago. And certainly more than we were three or four years ago, before the IPO. And that was a conscious decision for a number of reasons. We'd reached a size and a scale where false rumors really damaged our relationships with key audiences, with users, with advertisers, with other business partners. So rather than letting false rumors circulate or grow, it made sense for us to make our case for what we were doing and why.

"And you sort of saw that recently with the whole spectrum auction," said Schrage. "In the past we might have been much more secretive about what we were doing and why, and in this case we really made the decision -- close to the end of the process to be sure -- that it really was in our interest both commercially and for our users to be very clear about the principles that we thought should underlie the availability of the 700-MHz spectrum."