The google boys transcript

I'm Darren Osborne for the Biography Channel. Google was the brainchild of two Stanford PhD dropouts, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Now, before the two launched Google, internet searches usually turned up more garbage than gold, and waiting through all the irrelevant results was time-consuming and frustrating. But, Brin and Page streamlined the process and reinvented the way we gather information. Billionaires many times over, the two men still live very modestly.

The inventors of Google are next. Larry and Sergey are the quintessential Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. They're smart. They're visionary. Larry Page and Sergey Brin invented Google in the late 1990s when they were PhD students at Stanford. They think that basically they're doing something terrific, and they're really out to change the world. Today, Google is the world's preeminent internet search engine. It clarified and cleared up the clutter of the internet and made it possible to find what you were looking for quickly and easily.

It's hard to really predict what the impact of the Google will be. It's one of those technologies that shifts the way people do things. In the old days, finding stuff on the internet was complicated, so you had to be a skilled researcher. But, not today. Now, thanks to Google, the internet search company, everybody with a computer and an internet hookup can search the web. It clarified and cleared up the clutter of the internet and made it possible to find what you were looking for quickly and easily.

That was a major breakthrough. Google processes more than 200 million queries a day from all over the world. I'm from England, and a lot of people in England use Google. Everybody in Ireland uses Google. Yeah, in France. Google is in France very popular. One thing that's happened with Google becoming commonplace is people really expect to get information. So, you're going out on a first date, you Google. You find out something about the guy or the girl before you go.

The Google index becomes who you are in other people's eyes. Um, that's a new new thing, and we as a culture are just getting used to it. Google has helped improve health care. And doctors will all tell you that their patients are far more informed when they come in than they ever have been. Google was the brainchild of two brainy Stanford University PhD dropouts, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Larry and Sergey are the quintessential Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

They're smart. They're visionary. Uh, they're pigheaded in the best sense of the word. Page and Brin introduced Google in 1998. Their timing couldn't have been better. Google managed to take it just at the time when tens of millions of people were coming to the web. Dot-com startups were on fire. Interest in the internet was soaring. The web was exploding with information. The only problem was finding it. The existing search engines did the job, but they often turned up more junk than gems.

Before Google, often searching, you had to do it multiple times to be able to find what you're looking for. Or, if you're browsing on site like Yahoo, you had to click through a lot of pages. They all had uh various problems. Some had irrelevant results. Um, you'd type in a query for cars and get uh lawnmowers or tractors. Plowing through all the garbage to find the few nuggets of relevant results was time-consuming and frustrating.

To overcome the problem, search engines like Yahoo used human beings, librarians, instead of computers to catalog the web's information and create searchable directories. There's always been a basic uh philosophical difference between things like Yahoo and things like Google. The Yahoo side, which is what falls more under traditional librarianship, is that you have people who are experts, who know what's going to be the best thing to look at, and they can put together a catalog, an index, a directory that lets you go and find the things they put there.

But, that solution wasn't perfect, either. When you get millions and billions, and we'll be coming to trillions of different things on the web, you can't have enough editors to do that. Uh, but you can have computers, more and more computing power, to go and check that out. Brin and Page opted for computing power. After studying existing engines, they came up with a supercharged machine that became a model for all other search engines.

Now, what I would like to do is just to show you what 1 second Sergey Brin revealed some of its inner workings at a recent technology, entertainment, and design conference in Santa Monica. This is how we have to move the bits around to actually get the people the answers to their questions. You can see that um there's a lot of data running around. Uh, it has to go all over the world through fibers, uh through satellites, through all kinds of connections.

Brin and Page helped direct traffic to sites big and small, to independent journalists, to businesses and organizations which might not otherwise have been found. I think they see the goal of something like Google to a large degree is making society more democratic. Google also helped pioneer a whole new field of marketing that matched advertisements to relevant search results. Users, when they're looking for something like flowers, we'll serve a flower ad, something that's targeted to their very specific query.

Prior to Google, no one knew how to make money off of search engines, so no one paid much attention to perfecting them. Google has turned search into a money-making machine. Search-related advertising is now growing faster than all other forms of marketing. Google has become on both the search and the ad- advertising side sort of the standard for how you both find things on the internet and how you make money on the internet.

It's hard to really predict what the impact of Google will be. It's one of those technologies that shifts the way people do things. And the automobile didn't just get people from their farm to town, it shifted the whole culture, shifted the whole way that we organize cities and roads and everything else. The internet is doing that, and Google is a big part of making the internet work that way. Google's success has been closely watched by its rivals.

In November 2004, the fiercest competitor of all, giant Microsoft, announced that it was launching its own search engine. Now, everyone's gunning for Google and the guys who made it happen, two PhD wannabes turned search engine billionaires. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn't intend to start their own company. What they wanted to do was sell their invention to one of the existing search companies. AltaVista, Yahoo, you name it.

Excite, they talked Infoseek, they talked to them all. And all said the same thing. Search is kind of over. We're not that interested in great search technologies. Our search is good enough. And any one of those companies could have had that technology during that period of time, '97, early '98, for a song. So, they decided that they were going to form their own company and try to do it on their own. Brin and Page had known each other only 3 years at that point.

Brin, a 23-year-old doctoral student in computer sciences at Stanford, met Page, 24, in when he showed the newly arrived PhD candidate around the campus. Sergey and Larry were in the same program. They, you know, had uh similar research interests, but they were not friends. Um, and what I heard was when they met, they didn't really like each other. That doesn't surprise me at all, because super smart people generally are wary of other super smart people.

Page was the son of a Michigan State University computer science professor. Larry was always a very independent kind of guy. He's not the kind of student who comes in and says, "What are you working on? Tell me what to do." Uh, he'd come in and say, "I've got this idea I want to pursue." He was a born inventor. In his earlier career, he did things like build a huge inkjet printer of his own out of Legos, or it was a plotter.

He comes up with things that don't sound like they would work, and then he figures out how to make them work. Sergey Brin was the son of a University of Maryland mathematics professor. Brin's family had emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union when he was only 6 years old. Sergey always seemed very bright, of course, uh and very sure of himself. His interests ranged well beyond search engines. Sergey is is really looking into new ideas on biotech and space travel and those sorts of things.

Very interested in the outdoors and sports and roller hockey and stuff like that. But of the two, probably the more outgoing. Despite their rocky start, Brin and Page soon discovered they had much in common and began collaborating. We weren't really sure we wanted to build the search engine. We sort of accidentally ended up building technology that could help search and so then we built search engine. Myself and my partner Larry were just doing research in managing large amounts of information and what's called data mining, which means finding patterns in them.

Eventually we turned to the World Wide Web, which is basically most of human knowledge. What they found was a rapidly expanding universe of information and several flawed search engines. First of all, just their coverage, they couldn't cover everything. They could go out and get more and more pages, but the scale was exploding at a at a speed faster than they could handle and the time for response. That is, you went to one of those search engines and you discovered that it would take 10, 15 seconds to get results back.

Brin and Page were convinced they could do better. They looked at the construction of web pages, at the clickable buttons which link one page to another. Then they looked at the billions of clickable links crisscrossing cyberspace. And they discovered a pattern. The more authoritative, more popular sites all had lots of incoming links. Ultimately what we discovered is that you could take the patterns that you found in all the world's knowledge and use that to create a better search engine.

And that's exactly what they did. They wrote a search engine program which used the number of incoming links along with lots of other variables to identify which web pages were most relevant for each query. But finding computers to run the program was a problem. The machines that ran existing search engines were very expensive. So they had to figure out how to make do with what they had, which was a lot of personal computers, cheap stuff that was laying around.

They were able to go and put these things together. They took a bunch of computer hard drives and slaved them together. To save money, they built a cabinet out of children's Legos. After months of tweaking, they were finally ready to take their engine out for a trial run. We put up an initial very simple prototype at Stanford. It was It was actually originally the project was called BackRub. Pretty soon after that, the next generation we called Google.

Google sent a bunch of cyber explorers called spiders or robots out onto the World Wide Web to forage for information. Each time they found a new web page, they copied it and sent it back to Brin and Page's computers. By 1998, they had stored 25 million pages. At the time, search engines were not widely used, so some website owners were incensed at the intrusion. There's one guy who was an artist in Singapore, actually, who had a site.

It was public. It was open on the web. Anybody could go and get things. It wasn't that it was being held private. But all of a sudden he sees some computer at Stanford is downloading thousands of different pages from it. And we had to say to him, "Look, we're not saving the pages, we're not redistributing. All we're doing is indexing. All we're doing is making a list of what we find so that other people can find it." But he actually went so far as to talk to the legal office, say he was going to sue.

Despite the contrarians, most people liked Brin and Page's souped-up engine. It not only gave relevant results, it was also a lot faster than the search engines using the expensive computers. Typically, if you have a very large machine, the processor is running very fast, but there are bottlenecks. It takes it time. You can only do one disk drive at a time or something. What they realized is if you can figure out a way to get a lot of small machines working together on the search problem, that you don't have the same bottlenecks.

Brin and Page became obsessed with speed, doing everything they could to shave tenths and hundreds of a second off their search times. And they realized that if they could bring that time factor down to a second or less, that people would use search in a totally different way. So in their design of the computers and the servers, they kept that as a really primary goal. They had to get it down. They had to throw in enough extra computing, enough extra research memory, whatever it took, so they could get that answer back in a second.

Everyone who tried Google liked it. The name was supposed to be googol, g o o g o l, the mathematical term for one followed by 100 zeros. But Well, it was before the Google spell checker existed. I'll say that. Soon the number of queries on Google became more than Brin and Page's computers could handle. Encouraged by the reception Google got at Stanford, Brin and Page began looking for partners who wanted to license their technology.

Larry has always been motivated and Sergey, too, really by wanting to do something that's useful for the world. They both grew up in academic families. The making a lot of money wasn't what was important. It was learning, knowledge, teaching. And I think from the beginning there wasn't a drive of what's the most profitable thing to do. It was really what's the way that people can get the most information. But the world outside Stanford didn't share Brin and Page's idealism.

They said, "This is great idea technologically, but from the business point of view at that time, the wisdom was search engines weren't where it was at. They were a technical thing. They were going to be part of the woodwork, part of the infrastructure." In other words, you couldn't make money off of them. The big internet money makers were all portals, sites with lots of services and advertising, like Yahoo and America Online.

Unable to license their invention, the two young search engineers went looking for investors to start their own company. They found Andy Bechtolsheim, founder of Sun Computing. Andy whipped out his checkbook and on the hood of his car wrote a check to Larry and Sergey for $100,000 and said, "Well, what do I write it out? What do I make the check out to?" Um and they said, "Well, we're thinking of calling the project Google." So he wrote it out to Google and that forced them to incorporate.

Putting their PhD plans on hold, Brin and Page set up shop in a friend's home. We thought, "Well, they'll probably just be there during the day while we're at work and we won't notice." Um but they were actually there 24 hours a day all the time. As Page and Brin toiled, the number of queries rose to 10,000 a day and the press began to take notice. Articles praising Google appeared in newspapers and magazines. PC Magazine named Google one of its top 100 websites.

They ultimately secured $25 million in funding from two of the biggest names in venture capital. Um and when that happened, that's when the the the greater world first got an inkling that this might be a an important company. Funding in hand, still battling enormous odds, Brin and Page moved their fledgling company into spacious new quarters. Sergey and Larry are have all the advantages of youth. They think that basically they're doing something terrific and they're really out to change the world to use Steve Jobs' phraseology.

In 1999, 1-year-old Google had 39 employees and was receiving 3 million queries a day. A year later, queries were up to 60 million a day. During that time, Brin and Page introduced advertising on their search pages and signed partnership deals extending Google's reach to Italy, the United Kingdom, Japan and China. The company was clearly on a roll. To meet demand, Brin and Page hired hundreds of new employees, many PhDs, the best and the brightest.

In addition to just being bright, great at their job, uh accomplished, uh we want people who are going to fit the Google culture. And we have a very open, uh free atmosphere here. People have lots of fun. Uh they're excited about their work and they work work together a lot. Part think tank, part playground, Google's headquarters were a reflection of that culture. When we started Google, we started it to be the kind of place basically that we would like to hang out in.

We being, you know, computer science grad students. And so, you know, we had all this free food. Here, you just walk in, you know, you grab some healthy food. You can sit and chat with your colleagues, talk about all kinds of work projects, uh learn about new things. It's a place where you can you meet over game of pool and discuss some ideas there. And so, we find that this kind of environment, you know, very is very creative.

Google's creative environment has given birth to all sorts of new ideas, a search engine for images, one for catalogs, for comparing prices on consumer products, for news groups, news reports, and much more. While adding all the new bells and whistles, Brin and Page increased the power of their search engine, sending it deeper and deeper into cyberspace. So, how does Google work? Why is it so successful? Google's search for answers begins, as do many great journeys of discovery, with a robot explorer heading deep into the unknown.

In Google's case, the unknown is cyberspace. The explorer, a computer program Brin and Page call Googlebot. Googlebot crisscrosses cyberspace at warp speed. Its mission, to find every website, to copy every web page. So, it goes and looks at each page and says, "Ah, I found a new website goldmine." And it'll go over there and download those pages and find out if it links to anything that it hadn't seen before. In this way, it can span the whole world.

Googlebot keeps track of how often each website changes its pages. With a large search engine like Google, there's always a problem of freshness because there's no way you can go and do 3 billion pages every day. So, what they do is they have a complex set of priorities. So, there's certain kinds of pages which they'll actually go to on a regular basis. News companies, for example. Googlebot visits cbsnews.com in New York, for example, continuously throughout the day.

Each time it copies a page, it leaves an electronic calling card. On a sample day, Googlebot hit cbsnews.com servers more than 34,000 times. After copying a page, Googlebot sends it back to Google, where it's sorted and stored in the company's computerized index. When someone types a query, digital camera, for example, Google search engine doesn't have to search the entire World Wide Web. It simply scans its own archives looking for documents with those words on them.

In this case, 16,800,000 documents. You have to remember that computers aren't very smart. And they can go and find all the pages with particular words on them, but you've no idea whether it's from somebody authoritative, New York Times, Encyclopedia Britannica, or just somebody off in just some written some email that happens to be out on the web. So, how does Google figure out which of the 16 million documents are most important?

The answer is PageRank, a top secret algorithm invented by Larry Page. PageRank is what separates Google from the competition. What Google guys did, and brilliantly so, is to use the link structure of the net as a popularity contest. Page realized that the most popular websites all had lots of links pointing to them, and that those links could be used as a measure of importance. Pages vote for one another by linking to them.

When you put a link on your page to somebody else, you're saying that page is important, you're voting for it. So, a web page that had 20,000 links to it would be more important than one that had six or none. And that was good enough for Page and Brin. Their computers couldn't make value judgments, but they could count votes and list web pages in order of importance. Page's ranking system is actually much more complicated.

It looks at a lot of other stuff as well. What makes Google search engine even more remarkable is how quickly it works. Google is obsessed with speed. I mean, it's it's almost impossible to see how long it takes between hitting character turn and getting results back. The time to call up 16 million digital camera results and put them in the proper order, just .59 seconds. Google's speed and accuracy made it the engine of choice for searchers worldwide.

As the infant Google grew and changed, its logo marked the passing months. New Year's Eve hats gave way to fireworks, then pumpkins and turkeys. By 2001, the precocious 3-year-old was answering 100 million queries a day. We have about 5 billion pages in our index, which is compared to when we launched, we had, I think, 20 million or something like that. So, that's 200 times larger. We support 100 languages. As the company changed, so did the lives of its founders.

I get to travel a lot on business. I get to meet people. Just about a month ago, I was meeting Mikhail Gorbachev and some other dignitaries in an event in London. More importantly, Brin and Page reversed course on a critical issue, advertising. In the beginning, they were dead set against it. They saw it as annoying and a violation of Google's corporate philosophy. One of our engineers came up with a very simple way of phrasing it, which is, "Don't be evil." But then, Brin and Page discovered they could exorcise the evil by marrying search results with advertising.

Their theory was, if you can tie the advertising to the keywords, then the ads that would come up when you put in a particular keyword would be relevant to what you're looking for, and maybe even helpful. They called their advertising AdWords. They were simple text ads that were clearly separated from the search results. Some search engines out there today sort of mix in paid results with the regular results, and they don't label them.

So, so the user doesn't know that that would not have appeared had they not paid for it. And I I think that's really wrong. AdWords is actually the product that really launched Google into the stratosphere in terms of companies and and in terms of growth. You go to Google. You type in wildflower seeds. Up come a bunch of listings, little rectangular ads, little squares with type in them. Those are the sponsored listings or the pay-per-click ads, the AdWords.

The top listing is an ad for American Meadows, a Vermont-based company that sells seeds for all sorts of wildflowers. Google displays the ad every time someone types in the search term wildflower seeds. You click on this, and you go immediately to our homepage. Ray Allen is president of American Meadows. The really revolutionary thing about pay-per-click advertising like AdWords is you put your ad up there. The consumer really finds you.

You don't have to go find him like you do in an ad in a in a magazine or on television. He finds you. When someone clicks on one of their one of your ads, they're saying, "I want to I want to see your product." You're not having to hold up your ad and say, "Please look at my product." Nor do you have to pay thousands of dollars up front. Google auctions its search terms to advertisers on a per-click basis. Allen bid 62 cents for the term wildflower seeds.

Every time someone clicks on his ad, he pays Google that amount. Allen's bid was the highest, so his ad appears first. One of the most important things about making AdWords work for you is to be in the top three on your most important terms. You've got to be. Computer tools allow advertisers to monitor on a real-time basis how their search terms are doing. One of our best terms is always wildflower seeds. It's obvious, that's what we sell.

Uh in this report, for example, there's 1,675 clicks on wildflower seeds from Google. Those clicks cost Allen about $1,000 for $7,555 in sales. That's a good rate. And so, that's an ad the ad that's working. Allen says his sales have increased more than 30% since he started using AdWords. Wow, they think you're wild, kind of naughty and lovely. The folks at Daily Candy, an email newsletter, are also fans of Google advertising.

The New York-based newsletter, which also publishes editions for four other cities and a national version, targets young women who are born to shop. They are heavy spenders, very social, very interested in culture, fashion trends, and as a result, the advertisers are interested in getting their messages to these people. Daily Candy is free to subscribers. It makes its money by selling advertising to companies like American Express.

The more subscribers, the more it can charge for its ads, and that's where Google comes in. Peter Shankman, Daily Candy's COO, uses Google's pay-per-click advertising to attract subscribers. If a shopper types in sample sale, for example, up pops his ad. If people are looking on Google or trying to find information on sample sales there, they are great potential customers or subscribers. Daily Candy doesn't limit its advertising to Google search results.

It also advertises on myriad websites that have partnered with Google in a program called AdSense. Website owners receive a fee for hosting the ads. This case, Google searches for the words sample sale on participating websites and inserts Daily Candy's ad. Could be a website about sample sales or an article about sample sales or an article about food or restaurants or fashion. Uh and they're reading about the latest trends or styles that are going on in New York or Milan or or or Paris.

AdSense has been a boon to website owners and advertisers alike. It's been hugely successful. I think it at this point accounts for a third of uh Google's revenues. And it's actually a revolutionary product because what it has done is is that it's enabled the millions of bloggers that uh are out in cyberspace now to actually get paid for having a popular site. When Brin and Page started Google, they had no idea how they would make money.

Thanks to pay-per-click advertising, they no longer worry about that. Google turned its first profit in 2001 and it's been onwards and upwards ever since. The popularity of Google's pay-per-click advertising created a whole new set of challenges for Messrs. Brin and Page. Online businesses fighting for a spot among the top search results began looking for a competitive edge. The competition to be in the top five search results is in is intense.

In fact, Google has created an entire industry of companies that do nothing but advise advertisers on how to come up with keywords that uh will put them in the top five. One of those companies, they're called search engine optimizers, is Prime Visibility. This is showing us by clicking on the cache button what Google sees in its index. Andrew Hazen is the company's founder and CEO. Prime Visibility specializes in placing websites near the top of Google search results.

To do that, they tailor client sites to score high in PageRank, Google's measure of importance. Google is infamous for its uh PageRank. And they'll show you on a scale of zero to 10 what the website's PageRank is. A top-secret formula, PageRank reportedly contains more than 500 million variables. In this PhD paper, Page and Brin revealed that the most important variable is links from other websites. Search engine optimizers make sure their client sites have plenty of those.

Optimizers have figured out numerous other PageRank variables as well. Boxesdelivered.com, one of Hazen's clients, appears among Google's top three listings. Boxesdelivered.com is a website that helps people on the move. Basically, when people are looking to move, whether it's commercial or residential, we know from our keyword research that moving boxes and moving supplies are the top two searched for terms. Google awards high points to sites where the search term appears numerous times.

So, Hazen sprinkles the words moving boxes throughout the webpage. And as you scroll down, you can see the words highlighted and these are the words that Google can see in the formula and then take into account how often it's being uh mentioned. But it's not just quantity that Google is looking for, it's also quality. Where do the search terms appear? Everything gets a point value. So, a title tag, which is the name of the actual page, can get a scale one to 10, it might be worth an eight or a nine.

The actual page content can be worth a nine. Just having regular text is not as advantageous as having text in bold or in actual clickable links. Hazen also increased the number of clickable links pointing at Boxes Delivered from other websites. The original Boxes Delivered site had only six or nine. Hazen increased the number to 90. So, with boxesdelivered.com, we may look for a website, for example, that has a change of address service and we would put up a link on the Boxes Delivered website first and then contact them and say to them in an email, "We've already linked to you.

You can see by clicking here. Please be good enough to link back to us." Prime Visibility's clients include Lauren Hutton's Good Stuff, Tourneau and Wells Fargo Century. Website optimization is now an essential part of doing business on the internet. It creates an ecology of competition that that drives innovation. It also drives relevance in terms of, you know, the best sites that might possibly be the answer to a particular search are optimized to the top.

But unscrupulous operators can also use it to drive their websites to the top. Some optimizers create hundreds or thousands of web addresses for the sole purpose of linking them to a particular site and improving its PageRank. PageRank works on a voting factor, so they build their own artificial PageRank, their own popularity, by building all these fake domains. I know an optimization company that employs 50 translators that go out and translate pages just so that Google will index all these alternative translations.

Some optimizers have gone so far as to set up special algorithm crack teams reminiscent of US and British World War code breakers. And they study Google from the standpoint of programming. They will download page after page after page, search after search after search on Google to try and determine how how Google is ranking pages. It's a constant battle that uh is a little bit like the old Soviet-US arms race. Every time one side gets a new technology, the other side tries to come up with a new counter technology.

Efforts to beat Google's ranking system are a huge problem for Brin and Page because they threaten what has set Google apart from all the other search engines, the relevancy of its results. Google retaliates by periodically updating its secret algorithm. Back in February 2003, webmasterworld.com began naming the updates just as the weather bureau does hurricanes. The first was Boston, followed by Cassandra, Dominic, and Esmeralda.

Then, on the morning of November 14th, 2003, came the mother of all updates, Florida. We really don't know exactly what it was all about, but we know it was the most intense update Google has ever had. Almost every website that was commercially based on the net had pages that were lost, that gained. It was a dramatic shift. Untold numbers of commercial sites that were ranked high in Google searches were all of a sudden blown away, nowhere to be found.

Prior to the Florida update, we pretty much knew what Google would do and the updates were minor in nature. After the Florida update, nobody had really a clue what Google had done. It was it was chaos for a little while. It was a major major update, but it was it also I think a very important statement by Google that they're in charge here. And at the end of the day, they can do what they want with their index. By the end of 2003, Google had signed up more than 100,000 advertisers and was processing about 200 million queries a day.

It was the undisputed king of search and many of its original investors were eager to cash in. It was time for Brin and Page to take the company public. 2004 was a watershed year for Google, the year Brin and Page took the company public. And the year that powerhouse Microsoft officially launched its own search engine. In their letter to prospective stockholders, Brin and Page cautioned that Google would not be a conventional company.

Their goal, they said, was to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place. The stock deal was a reflection of the idealism that they uh bring to the way they run Google. And I think that they set it up so that not just uh institutional investors and Wall Street insiders would be able to benefit from the stock, but that uh their entire user base would be able to uh buy into the stock deal as well. The unusual approach meant smaller fees and smaller potential profits, thus alienating much of Wall Street.

Wall Street was also concerned about Brin and Page's management skills. As a result, Google stock offering got off to a rocky start with a price much lower than expected. In In world of business, it probably doesn't make sense to piss off Wall Street and when you don't necessarily have to. But it was Brin and Page who had the last laugh. The stock price eventually soared and they are now worth about $4 billion each. Friends say the windfall hasn't changed them, that they still have the same values as when they started.

I try to lead a modest lifestyle still. I have my car is about 10 years old. You know, it's Honda and nothing very fancy. I have an apartment um in Palo Alto. They are still very devoted to the business, very devoted to the technology side of it, to coming up with new ideas, building new things that make information more available. Nevertheless, the transition to a publicly held company has required some adjustments.

So, when their venture capitalist told them "Time to get a CEO, guys. You guys are growing and you really need some adult you know, supervision here." They didn't agree with that. It was really only until they could all settle on Eric Schmidt, who was a very well-respected engineer with a lot of management experience and sort of a perfect fit, would they even allow the idea of a CEO to come into the equation. Now that Google is a multi-billion dollar company, it faces challenges it never confronted before.

The biggest problem, I think, for Google is how do they go from being a company that had 100 people 2 and 1/2 3 years ago to a company that has 10,000 people in 2 to 3 years from now. That is the hardest thing for any company to do and they're doing it at a an incredibly accelerated pace. Many of Google's employees are now millionaires as a result of the stock sale. That creates other problems. I think as a result Google and Larry and Sergey are going to have to deal with turnover at Google in a way that they've never had to deal with before.

And then of course, there's the competition. Page and Brin have proven that search can be extremely profitable. Now, everyone is gunning for them. Yahoo has been buying up other search engines and adding services. With powerful Microsoft now flexing its muscles, many experts expect the beginning of an internet search war. We definitely have a new generation of competitors and it's something that uh uh you know, we take seriously.

Microsoft and Yahoo, are both very strong companies. To stay ahead of the competition, Google continues to add new sparkle to its growing list of services. Google Desktop searches a computer's hard drive just as Google searches the internet. Google Print allows users to search current books for specific information. The purchase of Keyhole Corporation allows users, for a fee, to search satellite and aerial images of the Earth's surface.

What Google wants to be and I think Larry and Sergey would acknowledge that they're only a part of the way there is to be the largest repository of information in the world. With about 8 billion documents and images stored in their index, the web's preeminent librarians are well on their way. Anything that you don't develop is a garden left untended, so to speak. So, there are a lot of really interesting next generation things that we're working hard to make possible.

Part of that hard work entails navigating through unchartered legal waters. Suits over AdWords clients using trademark search terms and invasion of privacy issues are potential signs of rough waters ahead. Claims of copyright infringement pose another potential hazard. Google searches turn up large numbers of copyrighted images and copyrighted newspaper articles, for example. Google doesn't remove them unless someone complains.

You know, if they can give proof of ownership of the web page, we take it off. We certainly respect that they are the owner of the content and if they don't want to make it available, then then that's that's fine by us. Page and Brin's quest to make all the world's information readily accessible raises an important societal issue as well. The more people use Google, the more it defines who we are in other people's eyes.

The danger is Google's information may be inaccurate or false. Google search engine has no way of knowing. It just includes those things that the index picks up and oftentimes those things are not the full picture of a person. Um but people still make decisions based on what they see there. For better and in some cases for worse, the genie of instant and ubiquitous is out of the bottle. In centuries to come, historians may well look back on the world before Page and Brin began their quest and remember it as the dark ages.

People will say I can't believe people ever lived in a world where every single bit of human knowledge isn't instantaneously available to them. Such a concept is still a little foreign to our ears. But Google's making it seem a little bit more practical. In 2003, Google launched a new version of Google News for Canada. Google News Canada provides access to up-to-the-minute news headlines and photos from thousands of international sources and gives more prominence to stories and sources that are local to us.

As for the future, Sergey says they're already experimenting with new ways to use Google. For example, you might be able to call a phone number, say what you want to search for and it'll be pulled up. At this stage, it's just a toy, but he says it's helping them understand how to develop future products. Meanwhile, Larry and Sergey are finally spending some money. They purchased a luxury Boeing 767 airplane for the company.

The two, who remain typically thrifty when it comes to spending on themselves, say that they have altruistic reasons for making the purchase. As Larry put it, part of the equation of this sort of machinery is to be able to take large numbers of people to places such as Africa. I think that can only be good for the world. The Google.org Foundation is currently doing philanthropic work in Africa. For the Biography Channel, I'm Darren Osborne.