All Eyes on Google

Short of "you're under arrest" there are very few things that the leaders of a young technology company would like less to hear than "Bill Gates thinks you've kicked his butt and now he wants your business." But Sergey Brin and Larry Page don't seem ruffled at all. Hanging out one day in their spacious new headquarters, the two young cofounders of Google are calm, even confident, in the face of a rising tide of competitors, technology challenges and the tricky process of using the principles of disorganization to build a substantial company out of one unquestionably brilliant idea.

Let's face it--it's good to be Google. Every minute, worldwide, in 90 languages, the index of this Internet-based search engine created by these Stanford doctoral dropouts is probed more than 138,000 times. In the course of a day, that's over 200 million searches of 6 billion Web pages, images and discussion-group postings. Searches for golf clubs, song lyrics, tomorrow night's blind date, recipes and the unaltered screen shots of Janet Jackson's Super Bowl boo-boo. Amazingly, the majority of those queries evoke satisfactory, even revelatory, results. Google has changed the way the world finds things out, and enticed it to look for things previously considered unfindable.

Not only has Google very famously become a verb, but Silicon Valley is holding its collective breath for the seemingly inevitable IPO, when Google will become a synonym for another word: wealthy. Still, even without a market cap, the two Google guys recently made the Forbes billionaire list.

Here they are, outlining their plans for getting all the world's information on their thousands of servers and delivering it to anyone who can peck a query into a search field. Brin, 30, the ruminative Russian-born son of a math professor who is Google's business visionary, won't sit down: he's bothered by a mild injury incurred by his hobby of gymnastics. As Brin stretches, 31-year-old Page, the guardian of Google's secret-sauce search techniques, tells a story.

"I was researching big computer networks the other day, networks," he says. "I put this really strange query into Google, and got this research paper with the exact things I wanted. Which would have been a many-hour process normally. It took all of 30 seconds. I gave it to a bunch of people in the company, and now we have this project. It's very likely that I wouldn't have done that at all if it had been more difficult. I think the value of that can be very large, making the world more efficient."

Exactly. Google has made such eureka moments as common as sneezing. Who hasn't had such a revelation on Google, whether the discovery was an old girlfriend's whereabouts or a cutting-edge treatment for a rare disease? Amazing to consider that less than a decade ago, search was a backwater, deemed not very interesting and certainly not very profitable. Instead, Internet companies put their energy into developing feature-laden "portals." Then came Larry and Sergey, and search became the center of the Internet universe. "Search is the ultimate killer online app," says Bob Davis, former CEO of Lycos. "The Internet without search is like a cruise missile without a guidance system."