No. 232, Santa Margarita Avenue, Menlo Park, California, looks like another ordinary house in another ordinary street. Susan Wojcicki bought the four-bedroom property for about US$600,000 in 1998 and rented out the garage to two Stanford students for US$1,700 a month to help with the mortgage.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin had met three years earlier when Brin was a tour guide for new students at Stanford University and Page was in his group. At first the pair, both born in 1973, found each other “obnoxious.” But it was the start of a lucrative friendship.
Page was interested in the mathematics of the fledgling World Wide Web and began studying how it linked together. His great insight was to think about Web sites like academic papers, which build arguments through citations of previous papers (and list them in the footnotes). Similarly, Web sites contain links that, when clicked on, take the user to another Web site. Page realized that the number of links to a page would be a useful guide to its relative importance.
He worked with the Russian-born Brin to create an unfathomably complex algorithm that could rank pages in terms of relevance, then turn it into a search engine for the Web. The first version of Google — named after googol, the term for 1 followed by 100 zeros — was released on the Stanford Web site in August 1996.
Page and Brin have been described as the Thomas Edisons of the Internet. Like many of history’s great inventors, they were in the right place at the right time, riding the wave of the dotcom boom and riding out the subsequent crash.
The co-founders never meant to build a business but now enjoy the fruits of success, flying around the world in a Boeing 767, kitesurfing and pursuing passions such as the environment: Both own Toyota Prius cars.
Brin and Page remain joint presidents — Brin in charge of technology, Page responsible for product launches — but the rapid growth of recent years has been steered by chief executive Eric Schmidt, 53, who came on board in 2001 as the commercial “brain,” negotiating the founders’ evangelism and the shareholders’ thirst for profits. It has been jokingly said that he provides “adult supervision.”
The biggest issue now facing Google — the one that an unnamed Google executive has dubbed the “atom bomb” — is privacy.
Google is the most efficient information-gathering machine ever built. Every time you use it to search the Web, the query you typed, the time and date, and the IP address and unique “cookie” ID assigned to your computer are recorded and retained for 18 months. If you log in to one of Google’s personalized services, such as Google Checkout, the company collects data tied to your sign-in. Its main objective is to learn about your preferences so it can give you better search results (did you mean “Paris Hilton” the celebrity, or the hotel?) and target you with relevant advertisements.
Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, says the company is making every effort to be transparent about what data it is gathering, including a series of explanatory videos on YouTube.
“We offer services in two flavors. If you don’t sign in, but go straight to search, then for all essential purposes the information is anonymous. If you do sign in, it’ll remember your browsing history and give you the benefits of personalized search. Even for these services you can use a pseudonym: Google doesn’t need to know and doesn’t want to know your real name,” he said.
It is true that Google doesn’t force anyone to reveal anything. But to quote a book currently popular among politicians, its users are “nudged” toward entering more and more information about themselves in exchange for personalized services.
Google can save you time and money, find a restaurant to your taste or a chemist to cure your illness, but only if it knows you well enough. Help it to help you: That is the siren song.
Schmidt raised eyebrows on a trip to London last year when he declared: “We cannot even answer the most basic questions about you because we don’t know enough about you. The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask questions such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job should I take?’ This is the most important aspect of Google’s expansion.”
A month later, the human rights watchdog Privacy International ranked the company bottom in a major survey of how securely the leading Internet companies handle their users’ personal information. Liberty, the civil liberties organization, and the National Consumer Council have also expressed concern.
These are early shots in a long war over how much Google the world can stomach. Many within the technology industry are unwilling to call on government to clip its wings because it goes against their faith in an open Internet, free of state interference.
But the European Parliament is already scrutinizing Google, and some believe it is only a matter of time before Ofcom, the media regulator in Britain, is forced to intervene.
Andrew Orlowski, executive editor of technology Web site The Register, says: “It’s the big regulatory issue of the next 10 years: how politicians deal with Google. If the Web is as important as the politicians say, it seems odd that one company sets the price and defines the terms of business.”
Others believe the free market will throw up alternatives, just as it did to the mighty Microsoft. Vasanthan Dasan, one of the Web’s pioneers and now an engineer at Sun Microsystems, perceives three threats to Google’s dominance.
“First, social networks such as Facebook and MySpace are transforming information about you in a much more targeted and finely grained way; Google is behind on that. Second, mobile phones will become increasingly useful for information, and Google is behind on that too. Finally, there are quite a few companies working on personal genomics: Knowing what your genes are so can you see your profile for genetic diseases and find customized medicine. Google will have a lot of challenges,” Dasan said.
But what also seems certain is that, along with its sway over advertising, media and publishing, Google will seek to conquer domains that no one but Page and Brin have even dreamed of. In a world where TV schedules are obsolete and content can be summoned on demand, for example, a search engine that can find the clip or program you want will be more important than ever.
“The problem with Google now is that they have to keep growing,” Andrew Keen said. “If they wanted to, they could destroy the publishing business and kill newspapers. Everything they do has a profound impact. It’s like that saying about America: When Google sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold.”
Born into the idealism of Silicon Valley, now courted by candidates for the White House, Google is not like other companies. It is colonizing and drilling the mental space, a Shell or BP of information.
Its casually dressed young staff, generally the brightest and best, have always typically asked: “Why not?” It is now employing some wiser heads to explain why sometimes the answer really does have to be “not.”
It may already be too late. The thing of wonder that Page and Brin gave the world 10 years ago became an 800 pound gorilla in record time. But no one remembered to ask: What happens when a gorilla just keeps growing and growing?
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