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Sergey Brin & Larry Page
Co-founders, Google.com
Sergey Brin: We were asked to come here today to discuss the future of the Internet, and instead I'm going to discuss something that might seems unrelated, and that being how Legos can save lives. But I hope to make the relationship apparent, quickly.
In 1962, the Department of Defense began development of what we now know as the Internet. The first public demonstration of ARPANET was in 1972.
Then, a couple decades later in Switzerland the World Wide Web was developed, along with the HTTP and HTML protocols and formats. In 1993, Mosaic was launched, which was the first graphical, easy-to-use browser available on a variety of platforms.
The Web grew very rapidly and we saw Yahoo! and Netscape and a number of other companies start up. The research behind Google began in 1995. The first prototype was actually called BackRub. A couple of years later, we had a search engine that worked considerably better than the others available did at the time.
And in 1997, here was the state of Google. In front of me I have what looks like just a pile of Legos. What I have here is our actual disc ray to ray that that we put together out of what appear to be Legos. When we were students at Stanford, we didn't have quite the right number of grants. We couldn't buy these fancy-shmancy expensive things, so we made do with what we had. These are not exactly Legos, they're bigger, they're Duplos.
But that is not true, either. In fact, they're imitation Duplos, because they were cheaper than the real thing. This turned out to be a big mistake, because the tolerances on the imitation Duplos are much worse than the tolerances on real Duplos, and as a result our system would crash from time to time, because these things would fall apart and the whole disc array would go down and you couldn't do any searches.
Exponential Growth
Had we used real Legos back then, maybe Google would be better now. The time at the early part of a project makes a big difference. In 1998 we actually started Google the company, at which point we started to use chewing gum and twist ties and those proved to work a little bit better. After that we grew – by word-of-mouth – approximately 20 percent per month. And 20 percent may not sound like a lot, but every single month that exponential growth adds up, and we're rapidly approaching 100 million searches per day. We have tens of millions of users now, all throughout the world.
One of our users sent us this email which says, "On Monday morning, as I started my workday as a Web developer and designer, I felt a pressure in my chest. Being 52 years old and somewhat familiar with the early warning signs of a heart attack, I thought I'd go online and check on the early signs of heart attack and stroke. My initial quest lead me to 'Blah, Blah, Blah'" – which is a different search site which I won't mention the name of – "wherein I entered the search terms 'heart attack symptoms'.
As I waited for the banner ads to download, and then the content, I became more and more anxious. I turned to Google. I knew from prior experience that I could expect the quickest search results possible, and I was not disappointed. In less than a tenth of a second, the top listing led me to the American Heart Association Web page. Their easy to understand graphics and descriptions lead me to acknowledge my predicament, and I went to the local hospital where I commenced to have a full-blown heart attack.
Thirty-six hours later, just prior to emergency, triple-bypass, open-heart surgery, my doctor told me that had I had a stroke at any time while waiting for the operation, the chances were great that I would not have survived. This was a very sobering thought to me, my wife and our three sons, who thought they may have seen the last of their dad. Simply put, had I putzed around waiting for another website to display interminable graphics and banner ads, I might not be here today. Instead, I wanted immediate results, got them from Google, and for once did the right thing by going to the hospital."
This is not the average search that happens 100 million times a day. But, there are very many searches that are for medical-related issues, for career, financial – things that are really important to people. A map representing where search traffic comes from looks like a satellite map of light pollution from space, because it's pretty much correlated to population. Every day we get a few queries from Antarctica, even. Google's used in every continent. It serves a lot of people. I'd like to think Google's unique, but there are many that have been built in a short amount of time: Yahoo!, Napster, Hotmail.
The Power of the Internet
All these services were built up really quickly, just by a few people, initially, and they serve hundreds of millions all around the world. That's the real power of the Internet.
The claim to fame of Tuvalu, a small island nation, is that they created the top-level domain name "dot-TV." Idealab paid the Tuvalu tens of millions of dollars for that domain name for their start-up. Now Tuvalu has a nice working airport. They brought power to remote parts of their country. And, you know, all this happened just because their name happened to be Tuvalu, which is sort of a testament to the strange things that happen on the Internet.
Just a few weeks ago, I met a young gentleman who is 16 years old. He was working with a small African nation to try to get this country to generate a lot of cash for themselves, just by virtue of their domain name. He is essentially building a business and, at the same time, helping out this country. With the Internet you can get a huge amount of distribution and the individual can be so powerful.
The main thing I've learned about the Internet is that individuals can really create a big difference. That can be both positive and negative. I don't know if anyone here has ever gotten an email virus. A kid somewhere can create an e-mail virus really easily that can disrupt the world for a few days. The power of the Internet should be used cautiously. We need to watch over that. But it's also a very positive thing.
Larry Page: What's going to happen in the future of the Internet? I actually typed into Google "the future of the Internet" and then "talk," hoping that I could find a ready-made talk that I could just give to all of you. But it didn't quite work, so we still have some work to do on Google, I think.
In the future, I believe information access and communications will become truly ubiquitous. That means that anyone in the world will have access to any kind of information they want or be able to communicate with anyone else instantly and for very little cost. That's basically happening now. Over half of the traffic on Google comes from outside of the United States. We serve people in 26 languages. Already, the Internet has really pervaded pretty much every industrialized country. The next step will be of course to have Internet access from places that aren't traditionally industrialized, as access devices become very inexpensive. I believe that will be a huge change for the world.
Also, you'll have access to any contents. So right now, the web you can access is very big. Actually, Google provides search over about 1.3 billion web pages. To put that in perspective, if you printed out all of our web pages, it would be about 110 miles high of paper. That's a lot of stuff, and it actually doubles roughly every year. We were at about 30 million pages when we've started. So there's been a huge change in the amount of information available, even over the last two and a half years. But right now, you can only access the stuff that's on the Internet. You can't access content that's in libraries. You can't access magazines. You can't access newspapers, in general, or old newspaper content.
You can't access all the television programs that have ever been broadcast. But all these things will happen, and in fact I gave a talk recently where I talked about the feasibility of providing access to all television. It basically can be done today.
Networking Power
Even language is becoming less of a barrier. There's pretty good automatic translation out there. I've been using it quite a bit as Google becomes more globalized. It doesn't translate documents exactly, but it does a pretty good job and it's getting better every day.
Are people going to be able to access everything, or are countries and organizations going to restrict people's access? It's going to be very hard to restrict access to any significant amounts of content. If you allow encryption, which allows people to scramble information, it's very difficult to control what people look at. So let's say you're in China, for example, and you restrict access to certain kinds of information. If you allow encryption to cross your country border, then I can connect to a computer in the United States, and that can allow me to access anything. That's the big public policy question. If countries allow encryption across their borders, it will be very hard for them to regulate any kind of information access. That has a lot of implications.
Most of the traffic on the Internet is from people going to a web page or sending email to your friends. In the future, probably most of the content and most of the traffic on the Internet will be computers talking to each other. At Google, we actually download the entire web. We do this every month, and in the future we'll do it much more often. That generates a lot of traffic. It's not a simple thing to do. People back up their computers. Your computer might have all the movies that you'd be interested in watching just stored on a computer and ready to go. So those all have to be transferred over the network. You're not requesting that information; it's just naturally flowing around the network.
A lot of the hype around peer-to-peer really has to do with computers talking to other computers and using all the computers on the Internet to do storage and computation. That will lead to very fast scientific advances in a lot of areas.
The other main issue I see with networks is that you have very limited access to the Internet. There are only a few people in the world who have DSL or cable-modem speed access for the Internet. Most other people are on slower modems. And even DSL and cable modems are a very small fraction of what you'd actually like to have in accessing the Internet. Most local computer networks are a thousand times faster than DSL access, and those networks are very low cost. It costs $15 for each connection on a local network. So you can see the connections to people's homes and to all the computers are really lacking, and that will continue to be a problem for a long time.
The Content Conundrum
So the other really interesting part about the future – which you've already seen from things like Napster – is what's going to happen to content. Will you have access to content? Will people make money from content? Will everyone just copy it illegally? These are all big questions that have yet to be resolved. It's going to be very hard to restrict content distribution. Computers are getting very capable. Something like Google, which indexes a billion documents, wasn't possible ten years ago. It would cost too much money. In fact, in about 15 years, you'll be able to store the entire web as it exists today on your hard drive. That's a lot of information. It's virtually all the movies that have been made or it's all the television or virtually all the text that people could actually type into their computers because people can only type so fast.
So given that, if it's as easy to copy as just moving around your hard drive, it's going to be very hard to restrict people. If there's a world war at some point, people aren't going to care particularly about intellectual property rights. So there's going to be a lot of access to information, and I believe that's a good thing in general. Companies like Google are trying to make sense of all that information that's going to be available.
One risk of that is that people don't get paid for their content, which is clearly a problem. I'd personally like to see a model where you can buy into the world's content. Let's say you pay $20 per month and get access to the world. Somebody else needs to figure out how to reward all the people who create the things that you use. This is basically what happens with a lot of systems today. Radio stations pay into a big fund, and then the organization decides which labels and which artists to reimburse, based on what got played on the radio. It's a nice model because it allows access to everyone for everything that exists, but you don't have to think about, "Oh, I'm going to spend five cents to look at this web page" or things like that. That will allow content producers to still get rewarded for what they do.
Unlimited Information
Another big risk is you have access to all this information, which might not be good. People might find bomb-making material or other things. How we're going to deal with that as a society is a major issue and a major risk of people having more information.
In the more distant future you'll have really good access to the Internet. Right now, you have to go find your computer and make sure it's booted up and not crashed, find the browser window and type in something, and then you might get something you want back, and you might have to wait a long time for it. In the future, maybe you'll just speak something. For example, I was recently interested in what the world's highest flying kite was. I'm an inventor, and I like to research things. I just typed "world record kite" into Google, and it came back in a half-second: 12,471 feet. I used to have to go to the library and do all this stuff, and maybe I'd get it back eventually.
But in the future, you'll have a computer maybe that you wear on you like you wear a cell phone currently. You'll just say, "I want to know this." And you'll get it back instantly. I was thinking that it might be difficult to require children to memorize things because if they have these devices. If you're memorizing facts, the instant you speak a fact, you'll get back the information you needed. So much like it's hard to test arithmetic with the calculator. It might not be so important to know lots of facts like it is today.
Google is a great example of what can happen in the future. It has more knowledge than any single human. Contained in the web is basically a good part of human knowledge. And we actually manage to do a reasonable job giving people information almost a hundred million times a day. And that's certainly beyond the capabilities of any single person.
