In six short years, two Stanford grad students turned a
simple idea into a multibillion-dollar phenomenon and changed our lives. Now
competitors are searching for a way to dethrone the latest princes of the
Net
Timothy Archibald for
Newsweek
Nerve center: Google's
Mountain View, Calif., server helps perform 200 million searches of 6
billion web pages a day
By Steven Levy
Newsweek
March 29 issue - Short of "you're under arrest," there
are very few things that the leaders of a young technology company would like
less to hear than "Bill Gates thinks you've kicked his butt and now he wants
your business." But Sergey Brin and Larry Page don't seem ruffled at all.
Hanging out one day in their spacious new headquarters, the two young cofounders
of Google are calm, even confident, in the face of a rising tide of competitors,
technology challenges and the tricky process of using the principles of
disorganization to build a substantial company out of one unquestionably
brilliant idea.
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Let's face it—it's
good to be Google. Every minute, worldwide, in 90 languages, the index of this
Internet-based search engine created by these Stanford doctoral dropouts is
probed more than 138,000 times. In the course of a day, that's over 200 million
searches of 6 billion Web pages, images and discussion-group postings. Searches
for golf clubs, song lyrics, tomorrow night's blind date, recipes and the
unaltered screen shots of Janet Jackson's Super Bowl boo-boo. Amazingly, the
majority of those queries evoke satisfactory, even revelatory, results. Google
has changed the way the world finds things out, and enticed it to look for
things previously considered unfindable.
Not only has Google very famously become a verb, but
Silicon Valley is holding its collective breath for the seemingly inevitable
IPO, when Google will become a synonym for another word: wealthy. Still, even
without a market cap, the two Google guys recently made the Forbes billionaire
list.
Here they are, outlining their plans for getting all the
world's information on their thousands of servers and delivering it to anyone
who can peck a query into a search field. Brin, 30, the ruminative Russian-born
son of a math professor who is Google's business visionary, won't sit down: he's
bothered by a mild injury incurred by his hobby of gymnastics. As Brin
stretches, 31-year-old Page, the guardian of Google's secret-sauce search
techniques, tells a story.
"I was researching big computer networks the other day,
networks," he says. "I put this really strange query into Google, and got this
research paper with the exact things I wanted. Which would have been a many-hour
process normally. It took all of 30 seconds. I gave it to a bunch of people in
the company, and now we have this project. It's very likely that I wouldn't have
done that at all if it had been more difficult. I think the value of that can be
very large, making the world more efficient."
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Exactly.
Google has made such eureka moments as common as sneezing. Who hasn't had such a
revelation on Google, whether the discovery was an old girlfriend's whereabouts
or a cutting-edge treatment for a rare disease? Amazing to consider that less
than a decade ago, search was a backwater, deemed not very interesting and
certainly not very profitable. Instead, Internet companies put their energy into
developing feature-laden "portals." Then came Larry and Sergey, and search
became the center of the Internet universe. "Search is the ultimate killer
online app," says Bob Davis, former CEO of Lycos. "The Internet without search
is like a cruise missile without a guidance system."
The rest of the industry has noticed. Boy, has it
noticed. To quote the numbers, Safa Rashtchy at Piper Jaffray reports that
annual search revenues are just under $4 billion today (about a billion of that
is Google's) and will almost triple over the next four years. But those figures
don't reflect search's real impact; those empty query fields on search pages are
the front doors to the Internet. If you're not indexed by Google, you pretty
much don't exist. And if you're a business with a high page rank—a key metric
that determines whether your site will be displayed high in the results for a
given query, or buried a few hundred mouseclicks back—you can count on a
thriving online trade. A horde of new companies has arisen whose services focus
on performing all the tweaks and playing all the tricks that supposedly get your
Web site listed higher on Google's results pages. (Google constantly fine-tunes
its system to frustrate such manipulating.) If you can't afford to hire one of
those firms, buy the latest offering in a famous series: "Search Engine
Optimization for Dummies."
March 29, 2004 Cover: Next
Frontiers
•
All Eyes on
Google In six short years, two Stanford grad students
turned a simple idea into a multibillion-dollar phenomenon and
changed our lives. Now competitors are searching for a way to
dethrone the latest princes of the Net
So
it's no surprise that all the companies that missed out the first time around
are now gearing up for the Search Wars, a clash that will be waged with
algorithms, measured by terabytes and scored by click-throughs. Gunning for
Google are Internet giants, clever new start-ups and an 800-pound gorilla in
Redmond, Wash. They might not have gotten it at first, but now it seems terribly
obvious. "Search has always been essential to people's lives," says Jeff Weiner
of Yahoo. "We're all trying to seek happiness—a new car, a job, a spouse ...
it's how we live."
What does Brin think of the gathering forces? He ...
stretches. "I've seen companies obsessed with competition, say, with Microsoft,
that keep looking in their rearview mirror and crash into a tree head-on because
they're so distracted," he says. "If I had one magic bullet, I wouldn't spend it
on a competitor, I'd spend it to make sure we're executing as well as we
possibly can. I think we're doing a pretty good job."
The folks at Yahoo can't disagree. Just over a year ago
those at the archetypical Internet portal realized that while the world was
bowing before the altar of search, their company was little more than an
overtaxed Web directory and two pieces of paper licensing other people's search
technology (including you know whose). People didn't Yahoo anybody—they Googled.
And for the folks at Yahoo, that could not stand.
