Google's search engine is a phenomenon; the company is a Silicon Valley
wonder.
By Mary Anne Ostrom and Matt
Marshall KRT News Wire
May 27, 2003
Around the globe, Google has
become a synonym for searching the Internet, as in let's ''Google''
that.
In Silicon Valley, the Mountain View, Calif., company is the
hottest private company around, with a good shot at becoming a business legend
like Netscape, Apple or eBay.
Founded by a pair of Stanford graduate
students in 1998, Google reinvented online searching. Today, the company says it
handles 200 million searches a day and, according to some estimates, about 75
percent of all search-engine-generated traffic to Web sites.
The site
makes it possible to search instantly for virtually anything on the Web. Google
is an encyclopedia, phone book, shopping catalog, news archive and gossip sheet
rolled into one.
''Google has made knowledge a habit,'' said Barbara
Quint, a librarian and editor of Search Magazine.
The company is also a
rare reminder that there is financial promise in the Internet. Google, with 800
employees and growing fast, won't disclose its finances. But speculation within
the industry is that Google will ring up $400 million to $700 million in sales
this year, most of it from using technology to target relevant ads to Web users.
The company says it has been making money since December 2000.
Yet
profits alone don't seem to be enough for Google's two ambitious young founders.
Their ethos of thinking big evokes other celebrated Silicon Valley companies
that tried to change the world through technology. The mindset has trickled down
through Google's geek-filled staff and is enforced by an official policy that
company engineers devote a quarter of their time to thinking up great, new ideas
— even if their financial promise is questionable.
In many ways,
co-founders Larry Page, 30, and Sergey Brin, 29, have the quintessential story:
using Stanford as a lab for their brainchild, launching in a garage and
attracting high tech's premier venture capitalists.
In the wake of the
Silicon Valley's most precipitous slump in decades, they represent a new dot-com
generation focused on perfecting their product and turning a profit — before
going public, not after.
While many investors and employees would love to
see a Google initial public offering, the two founders recently have dampened
those expectations. Going public would invite scrutiny of the company's bottom
line, which could lead to short-term thinking and cautious strategy, they
warn.
Instead, Google is tackling one of the biggest challenges of modern
life: helping people find information that's important to them.
''It's a
really important, big problem for the world,'' said Brin.
As for holding
off on an IPO, he added: ''Right now, I think we're really enjoying the time
when we can have a lot of freedom and be as impactful as we possibly
can.''
Brin and Page so far have had their way, demanding only the
sharpest technology, hiring only the smartest of employees (Google once required
SAT scores of job candidates), and plowing ahead with ideas, sometimes quirky,
that will take Google deeper into the lives of Internet users.
Without
spending a dime on a branding campaign, Google has embedded itself in popular
culture.
On a night that game-show host Regis Philbin asked the
million-dollar question on ''Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,'' Google registered
tens of thousands of queries from users researching the answer.
Philbin
wanted to know the maiden name of Carol Brady of TV's sitcom ''The Brady
Brunch.'' The answer, Tyler, is derived from near-instantaneous searches of a
giant network of Google servers that index more than 3 billion Web pages.
(Today, that search returns 3,440 Web links in 0.19 seconds.)
These days,
Google is expanding its search territory to compete with bigger and broader
Internet players like MSN and Yahoo.
There's Google News, thought up on
an employee's whim, which offers up-to-the-minute news stories culled from 4,500
sources. There's the indexing of photos and catalogs. There's Froogle.com, a
product search site.
Google's biggest money-maker is advertising. It gets
paid to place small text ads above and next to non-commercial search results on
its own site and the sites of partners such as America Online and Amazon.com.
Google says its 100,000 advertisers make it the world's largest Web-ad
network.
Google started with two Stanford computer science students, both
sons of math professors. Brin, born in Moscow, and Page, from Michigan, sought
to prove that a mathematical analysis of the links among Web sites could produce
better search results than simply counting keywords. They defined relevancy by
the number and quality of links to a Web site.
They called it Page Rank,
after Larry Page. And the process could be completely automated, with no human
editors.
The founders and first few employees met around a ping-pong
table in a Menlo Park garage. During a 1998 meeting with early investors, Sun
Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim tired of listening to Brin and Page
worry about spending money. He raced back to his Porsche and insisted on writing
them a $100,000 check. He made it out to Google.
No such entity existed,
forcing Brin and Page to set up the company in order to cash it. Google is a
play on ''googol,'' the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros, a
reference to organizing the seemingly infinite Web.
By June 1999, Brin
and Page had attracted more than $25 million from two legendary venture
capitalists, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Michael
Moritz of Sequoia Capital.
The founders resisted when pushed by those
backers to hire a chief executive, taking a year to agree on a choice. Eric
Schmidt, the former Novell CEO and onetime Sun Microsystems executive, joined
Google in August 2001.
The search dragged on so long that Moritz
threatened to pull his money. ''I felt I grew tusks,'' he mused.
Although
they have given up a sizable stake in the company to venture capitalists, the
eccentric founding pair are Google's cultural soul and, along with Schmidt, run
the company.
Page is the more cerebral of the two, the big thinker who
also worries about whether his engineers will like their new digs. Brin,
insiders say, has more business instinct, is the negotiator and has a sharp
sense of humor that usually involves poking fun at his co-founder.
''Of
the two of us, Larry will always take the extreme position,'' Brin said. When
the subject of free employee lunches came up, Page proposed a plan to feed the
world. They compromised on free staff lunches and dinners. Recent menus included
endive and pear salad with pomegranate molasses dressing and pork loin in
mustard veal reduction sauce, prepared by an award-winning former chef to the
Grateful Dead.
Google headquarters, known as the Googleplex, is a
throwback to the late 1990s. In the lobby, decorated with lava lamps and giant
plastic balls, an engineer takes a break to play a baby grand piano. A pool
table is nearby, and Brin and Page zip around on their new Segway
scooters.
Benefits include company-paid, midweek ski trips to Squaw
Valley and maternity and paternity leaves with 75 percent pay.
The
freewheeling culture can lead to some pie-in-the-sky ideas: Over a January
dinner at venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson's home, Page and Brin became
excited about the idea of rearranging atoms into super-tiny computers and
exclaimed they could create a nanotech lab at Google. (The company says there
are no such plans.)
''It is like Netscape in the early years: kids
sleeping on the cots, the dogs are in there, they've stacked up the beer cans,''
said Doerr.
But Google has a discipline, albeit unconventional. Engineers
— including more than 60 with doctorates — work in committees of three to
develop projects. The trio with the most ambitious but plausible idea gets the
most backing.
As Page explained: ''You'll get more resources within the
company, you get people more excited, you get people outside writing about
it.''
While they dream, Brin and Page also keep their eyes on the
details: They use software to tally, to the second, how much money the firm is
raking in.
They said the free, healthy meals only came about after
calculating the time saved from driving off-site and reduced health care costs.
There's even a webcam trained on the cafeteria lunch line, so employees can
avoid a long wait.
While most of the tech world buzzes about an IPO,
Google's founders hold firm to their technological ambitions, building, in
Page's words, ''the ultimate search engine.''
''It would understand
exactly what you type and would give you the right things back,'' said Page.
''We're pretty good, but we're nowhere close to being perfect. We won't be for a
long time.''
