|
Sergey Brin & Larry Page
Co-founders, Google.com
Answers to Written Questions from the Floor:
Q: How on earth does that search engine work so quickly?Page: We have billions of small children in Africa that actually produce the search results. No, the true answer is that we have nearly ten thousand servers now and about a hundred engineers who make them work really quickly.
Q: Sergey, how does it feel to be the Internet's second most eligible bachelor, according to Women.com?
Brin: You know, I demanded a recount…
Q: Could you two talk a little bit about how Google has been growing over the past couple of years. A member of the audience says they have never seen an advertisement from your company. Rather, they have heard about it from friends. Is Google a grassroots company?
Page: Absolutely. If you have a really great product people tend to use it, and especially now that we have the Internet which has a tremendous distribution rate – there is worldwide distribution as soon as you put up a web page. If you have a great product that meets people's needs, they start telling their friends, especially when it's a search engine, which is something that everybody has to use. So we've actually been growing 20% per month, compounded, for our whole history, and without spending any significant money on advertising. It's an incredible phenomenon.
Q: There was also incidentally an article in the New York Observer not so long ago about "Googling somebody": in other words you enter their name into the search box to do a background check or to find a little bit about that person's background. Do you guys use that on future employees?
Page: Yes, in fact I Google lots of people that I meet, just to find out who they are, and certainly for a candidate who is applying for a job. Or just people who you are scheduled to meet; it's really useful.
Q: How do you feel about services like Napster? Do you think the government should shut services like Napster down?
Page: Content owners, meaning the record labels in this case, have a right to make sure that their content is easy to access. They should make sure that people can access their content over the Internet, and they haven't done that, and that is why Napster exists. If you had a five dollar a month or ten dollar a month subscription service that allowed you to access all music with high quality and so on, it would be much harder for something like Napster to get started. The people who own content have a responsibility to make it available to everyone in the world. Clearly copying lots of music without reimbursing artists in any way is not a good plan, or you won't have any music in the future. But I don't think it's quite so simple to say, "Napster is bad."
Brin: I agree with Larry in terms of the responsibility of the record labels. I think actually that radio, which already has a very good system for paying artists for their music in that there is actually a big pool which all radio stations pay into that then re-distributes the money to the artists. I think that's a pretty good mechanism. So the subscription model could work in the same way, where you have a big pool where all subscriptions go, then there's an organization that redistributes the money to the artists. And I would further say that it could be very efficient, and therefore the artists could get a greater proportion of the revenues from that. Nevertheless, making music is pretty easy and fun, and so lots of people will continue to do it for free, and I'm sure there will be lots of free music out there.
Q: What is the worst thing about the Internet? What is the best?
Page: I'd say the worst thing about the Internet is that it's slow. But that will continue to improve. The best thing is probably that you have access to so much stuff, which, as an inventor, I really enjoy. I used to trek across the country to go to Powell's Bookstore in Oregon, from Michigan, to buy a whole bunch of books. And I'd fill my suitcase up with books and then carry them back to Michigan, so I could work on electronics and all these things. All that stuff is on the Web now, and that's a huge change.
Brin: Probably the best thing about the Internet is that it really brings the world together. You have services like eLance out there right now, where somebody from Bangladesh can sign up to do a project for a company in the US and bid effectively against US-based consultants. So I think this will really work to effectively raise the Third World.
Q: How does Google make profits? Can you talk a little bit about your business plan?
Brin: The business is not quite as complicated as the search engine. We make our money from two sources: one is advertising. There are a lot of people out there who don't realize Google has ads, and the reason for that is that we run the ads that are targeted to your search on a small percentage of searches. If you search for flowers, and we have advertisers that are advertising 1-800-FLOWERS and FlowersOnline, and so forth, then you'll get ads. They are just text based, and we have a description of the site that's in a separate box marked as a sponsored link, so it's completely separate from the search result.
That's part of our editorial integrity: the search results are always completely objective, and the advertisements, which are either above or to the side, are the paid-for listings. When you show really relevant ads, the users will tend to click on them and purchase the products. We've been fortunate to have really high click-throughs and back-end conversion. The other side of our revenue is search services and other companies like Yahoo! use our search services, both for searching the Web, and for searching their site.
Q: Does Google have plans for an IPO in the near future?
Brin: No, we are fortunate right now to be a private company and we have no immediate urge to become public because there's a lot of added reporting, and because of our finances we're in quite good shape.
Q: Your company seems to have a so-called "old economy" model. Some Internet companies have been accused by some people of growing too fast, getting too big too fast. Can you speak to that?
Page: I think that's absolutely true. We were, I guess, lucky enough to be trying to be profitable long before it was fashionable, and that was a really good decision. I think it's more luck than real insight on our parts, but Sergey and I really felt a lot better about having a business that could actually make money. So we figured that once we were at that stage then not much could hurt the company. We've actually been very deliberate about making all of our decisions in a way that minimizes the risk that we will go out of business basically. We have pretty conservative financial planning. That turned out to be really smart, and we've had tremendous viral growth anyway, so we haven't really had any marketing expenses or things like that and we have huge volumes.
Q: How important are your international business and your customers abroad.
Page: Over half of our traffic comes from outside of the United States. We have very significant business deals with companies all around the world: NEC in Japan, Virgin and DotNet in Britain, Vigilio in Italy. We provide search for all those companies and for users in all those countries. We've seen huge growth, amazing growth, in a lot of these places in the world. Ones that are smaller, but are going to be big like countries like China, are just behind.
Q: Sergey, what progress is being made in effective searching technology on the Internet? How are things evolving?
Brin: When we started the company our index probably had about 30 million pages, which was a good chunk of the Web; maybe out of 150 million or so. Now we have over a billion-page index, and the Internet has grown to probably over two billion pages now. The size of the problem has grown a lot. There are many more languages that have a really significant presence and there are many more kinds of websites – everything from the first billion digits of pi with every digit on a separate web page to sites about different DNA sequences. All different things. We have a hundred engineers increasing quality: over 40 of them have Ph.D.s. There's a separate research group within that, so I would say there are big strides being made. We're catching up in percentage terms, in terms of our coverage of the Web as a whole.
Q: Do search engines have any moral obligation with regards to content? In other words, should certain pages not be found?
Brin: There are some embarrassing pictures of me on the Internet and they should not be found. Seriously, that is a very good question, and one that we struggle with. Right now for some customers in some countries we actually have to provide various kinds of filtering based on the laws in those areas. At Google we try to provide everything to everyone by default, so we don't censor. We serve probably about a third of the world's web searches right now, so as we grow and we have increasing responsibility in terms of providing all information to all people, that's a critical issue and one that we're going to have to think about continually for a long time.
Q: I've heard the term "flavor of the month" batted around now and then when talking about search engines and portals. Is either of you worried about another search engine coming along that's better than Google and becoming a so-called flavor of the month?
Page: When we started working on Google five years ago at Stanford, we actually went and talked to a lot of search engines looking for them to license this great search technology from us, but they turned us down. It was really amazing to us that the people running these companies didn't realize that search was going to improve greatly, that the Web would get bigger, that more people would be using the Web. These were major technical challenges.
Furthermore, search engines don't always give you the right answer—and the closer you can get to always giving you the right answer, the more significant you are to all the people in the world who use search engines. So we're the first company to really take that as our mission, to improve search, to improve it indefinitely in a way that will really affect people. So in that sense we are less vulnerable than those companies were. We're much more aggressive about improving our technology and also about licensing new technology that comes along. So, I'm not as worried as you might think I would be, but we still do continually worry about what might come along.
Q: Sergey, where will Google be in one year?
Brin: The challenges of search are going to continue to increase. Where I'd like to see us is to be able to really answer more complicated questions where it's not just a matter of the same search terms on the same pages, but really starting to use reasoning across multiple data sources and things like that. On another front, we do a lot of work on wireless technology so we now have search available on WAP phones, on i-mode, which we recently launched. In research we're working on speech interfaces research, and we were recently working on a demo with BMW of a search car, where you can do searches as you drive.
Q: I know that in the past few days you've apparently started a white pages search where you can enter someone's name and an area code. Can you talk about how that works?
Brin: Periodically we actually add features to the site and people may not always be aware of them. You can get links to map sources, if you enter stock quotes you'll be able to get stock quote services for those symbols. Now you can type for example a person's name and a state and you will be able to get address listings above the search results. Also you can punch in the phone number and you can see who lives there and so forth.
Q: Become a spy of sorts…
Brin: There's a lot of information on the Internet and we try to add as many databases as possible.
Page: We actually don't allow searching certain kinds of reverse address searching, which is often on the Internet but we believe that's a significant risk, so we don't offer that. We do try to think very hard about the services we offer from the standpoint of people's safety and all these kinds of things.
Q. Since neither of you is native to this area, how have you seen Silicon Valley change over the past couple of years?
Page: Silicon Valley has become less livable. Housing costs are a really big problem, especially for young people. We hire a lot of younger people, and it's very hard for them to come into this area and find reasonable housing even though we pay them quite a bit.
Brin: There are just a lot of visual distractions – all the billboards up and down 101 have a materialistic focus on money, which I don't actually enjoy at all. Some of the billboards use words like "proliferate," "capitalism," and things like that. I think that sends the wrong message. And so I think a little bit of a downturn in the market will hopefully be good from that point of view, and let people focus on other important things in their lives.
Q. Do you think the Internet technology will help increase or decrease the gap between rich and poor?
Page: I would say both.
Brin: I would echo that. The big trend in terms of lifting Third World countries and empowering people in Nepal and Tibet to participate in the world economy, are unquestionably narrowing the gap. But then you have examples of companies where a few people start a company that turns out to generate a lot of wealth for a few individuals.
Page: Technology knowledge is going to drive wealth: people's ability to deal with technology and to build interesting things. People have done studies where they've put computers in an African village that's never seen any technology before, and they come back in a month and everyone knows how to program. And this has an Internet connection and everything, and they're using the Internet and they're conversing with people and so on. And I think that is a phenomenon that will happen. On the other hand, there will be lots of people who aren't technology savvy within industrialized countries, and the gap will widen for those people.
Brin: As another example: they're currently building schools in Cambodia for about $15,000 a piece per school with Internet connectivity and with satellite television. So it's quite amazing what countries can do using a very small amount of technology. It's very cheap.
Q. As wonderful as it is, do you feel it has been over-hyped as a technology that can change the world?
Brin: The answer is undoubtedly yes. It's been over-hyped by some, under-hyped by others. The Internet has made a big change in the world and will continue to do so. It depends on what you read in terms of the scope of that change. It's not going to make you walk on water tomorrow. On the other hand, I think it means you can get access to all information pretty much anywhere.
Page: It's been over-hyped in terms of companies. It used to be that if you had any kind of idea and it involved the Internet, somebody would throw money at you and you'd have a hundred people suddenly, when you don't really have a business. You have to have something that makes real business sense and that can make money quickly and in a sustainable way. And the Internet really changes all that. There are a lot of services you can provide very cheaply. You can provide very far reaching services like we do at Google that don't necessarily cost that much to run
Q. Do you think Stanford will ever just give in and award you both your Ph.D.s?
Brin: I keep working on it. I actually swing by Stanford every other day and I talk to my thesis committee. But they actually want me to write the thesis, so I think I'm really going to have to do that.
Page: Yeah, I'd agree with that.
Tom Campbell
Dee Dee Myers