When Larry Page and Sergey Brin were computer science PhD students at Stanford, they wondered if there was a better way to find information on the web. Their research project turned into a much-praised search engine; it is called Google, which became popular mainly by word of mouth. Since turning Google into a business three years ago, the company has won a number of industry awards for technical excellence and ease of use.

Currently, Google handles over 100 million search requests every day. The Wall Street Journal has called Google "everything a search engine should be: thorough, smart, speedy, and honest." I'm pleased to welcome to this table for the very first time, those two founders of this company.

Let me just start with the idea. What happened? I mean, tell me one more time because Google is Google is Google.

Well, we were working on our PhDs actually, and we accidentally happened across better search technology. So we didn't even intend to build a search engine, we just sort of fell into it.

And we started downloading everything on the web and we started doing interesting research on it. We actually went to Yahoo once we had something interesting. We went to David Filo, he's one of the founders of Yahoo. He said, "This is great search technology, why don't you guys make a company and maybe we'll use you someday."

And we sort of went off and we continued doing our research for a long time.

David said that to you?

Yes, yeah, yeah. And eventually, we actually started a company. We finally broke down and said we're not quite going to finish our PhDs right away, we're going to start a company to get this thing out into the world.

Tell us about the name Google.

Um, Google comes from the number googol, which is the one with a hundred zeros after it. However, it was coined before we had the Google spell check feature. In fact, the number is spelled G-O-O-G-O-L, but the company is G-O-O-G-L-E.

You did not launch any great marketing campaign. You literally let it expand by word of mouth.

That's right. We launched the search engine originally at Stanford. We carried over the traffic to the google.com site and we grew from there like 20% per month, every single month, over and over and over. And over three years, that compounds to a huge amount of traffic. Now, in every country in the world, we just get a lot of usage and we continue to grow based on the quality of the product.

When you went searching for money, what did you find?

We actually... it's very interesting being at Stanford, I guess there's a lot of resources available. And actually, very quickly we got to David Cheriton, who's one of the founders of Sun, and he said, "You know, this is great, how about I write you a check?"

All right, is that what he said?

Yeah, and he just wrote us a check. And we had no lawyers, we had no company. The check actually sat in my desk drawer for like a month—it's like a hundred-thousand-dollar check—because we didn't know what to do with it.

You couldn't cash it?

We didn't have a company. It was made out to Google.

That's right. Don't you know that after 90 days a check is no good?

Well, we did it as fast as we could. It takes time to get a company and get lawyers and all those kinds of things, you know.

Why does it work so well? I mean, I remember the first time... because it's only a search engine. You don't do other things. Google is not a portal, it's a search engine.

Yeah. That's part of the reason it's successful. Don't you think that in fact is the main reason it's successful? There are several technologies that we developed initially that made it work really well, having to do with using the web as a whole rather than just what words occur on each page.

But we quickly moved beyond that, beyond the first few technologies that we developed at Stanford. We hired up a research group, a really good staff of engineers. At the same time, the other search engines were stopping working on search. You can see now Excite—I mean, they're really questioning even if they're going to continue the portal, much less working on their search engine. Infoseek got bought by Disney which eventually got shut down.

But make the point here, which is: you went to both of them, did you not, at some point?

We talked to both of those companies, in fact. And even back in '96 or '97, it was clear they wanted to be Yahoo. They weren't concerned about search. In fact, the quote from one of their CEOs is, "Oh, if our search is 85% as good as the next guy's, that's good enough for us." And we really didn't believe that was true. We think search is really important to people—that's how you get information, which is really critical to you. So we set about creating our own.

Is the business model today the same as it's always been?

Actually, it's remarkably accurate to our initial business plan. Yeah, we sort of joke about this, but it's probably within, you know, 30 percent or something of the numbers we predicted. So we have managed to keep a very stable business model. It's very much what we expected it to be and it's been very successful.

It's a private company.

That's right.

You'll go public at some point. Was the intention... did you think you'd go public earlier than this, and then when the bubble burst you said, "Well, let's wait until the fallout clears"?

Well, we've actually sort of bucked those trends. We've been really interested in being profitable, like long before it was fashionable. He thought profit was good a long time ago. So we were much more conservative; we didn't do a 100-million-dollar ad campaign like some of our competitors.

Here's what I've heard, I'm so happy to have the two of you sitting across the table from each other. You know where I'm going, don't you? The idea was that you were not best friends, were you? I think I read somewhere that you didn't even like each other very much.

That's true, but we're pretty good friends nonetheless.

You didn't like each other very much at the beginning, but you tolerated each other?

Yeah, I think, you know, Larry's kind of obnoxious but...

You know, he's obnoxious and you're a nice easygoing guy?

I'm very easygoing, so I'm able to get along with him.

To this characterization, Larry?

Not really.

Has success been able to bridge this gap between you?

Well, I think we should say the gap was more in the beginning when we first met each other. Yeah, we both really disliked each other.

We remember this, but just tell me why.

Um, it was pretty much for the reasons that Larry said. I mean, obnoxious... yeah, we're both actually kind of obnoxious. And uh, we met when I was recruiting him to the Stanford PhD program. Larry had to comment on every single thing and be difficult in every conversation, and we have to debate every single point. Which I guess are things that I tend to do as well. So while we are continuously arguing, I guess that's also our commonality. And we grew to be friends pretty early on once he started in the PhD program.

Now, does what's happened in terms of the bursting of the bubble... does that make a difference? I mean, what impact does that have on you guys?

I think on Google, really, it definitely has an impact. Like actually the office space around us is 30% taken now. It's of course experienced in lots of people looking for a job.

That's right, so you can find some talent out there with not the same kind of competitive rates.

Yeah, we actually get about 500 resumes every day. So there's tremendous interest in people working at Google. But I think the bubble's actually in some ways been nice for us because we've really been focused on core, you know, making money, being pretty conservative about how we run our business. And that's much more what the market's returned to.

Let me ask a couple of things about today. One, you've just hired Eric Schmidt. He's been on board how long?

Like three months now.

Yeah, he came... this is a guy who was a technology chief for Sun Microsystems, then he went to Novell, right?

And he's still their chairman there.

Yeah. But he's come over to run Google. What's the idea behind that? I mean, you guys couldn't run it yourself?

Parental supervision. To be honest, you know, as much as I think we've done well...

You needed an adult around, right?

Do you agree with that, Larry? You guys need an adult supervision?

Oh, I don't know. I don't know if I'd say need, but you know, it's really nice. It's beneficial.

Yeah, it's... you know, we're past the age where we're rebellious. Earlier when we were in our teens and so forth, you know, you don't want the parents around. But now we're getting closer to 30 and so forth.

And you know, our search engine really serves the world. We perform over 100 million searches a day. It's really important to people. We have a big company, 200 employees. It's a large responsibility. And if you can bring in experience to help out, I mean, I think that's pretty reasonable. Of course, it makes sense and he's a very talented guy.

Talk to me about the evolution of this business. First of all, why were you more successful? I mean, why is it that even Yahoo turned to you about a year ago as its search engine?

Well, I think they gave a bunch of reasons. In fact, David Filo gave a bunch of reasons saying that our search was much better. It's clear that we had invested a lot in search, we care a lot about search, that we had a lower cost basis—we used lots of low-cost PCs—and that we had a trajectory to stay better and improve even more than our competitors. So for all those reasons, they chose us.

Yeah, I've seen this list—and you guys may know it, but because I don't have it in my head and I don't have it written down somewhere—which is the things that were the most searched for 10 names. Do you know them offhand in the last week? I think it is Lizzie Grubman's was one.

Yeah.

What else?

The British Open, two, I think.

You know them better than that.

Uh, Penelope Cruz was three because the movie she was in, I guess. I can't remember the others offhand. But yeah, we really see trends and culture on our search engine because, you know, you'll see when something happens, all of a sudden searches shoot up.

We had this incident when there was on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," I remember there was like a big question about Carol Brady—Carol Brady's maiden name in the Brady Bunch. And you could see if you looked at the graphs on Google how many people were querying for Carol Brady. Like, this was existing, and then at the exact right time, within like two minutes, like 40,000 searches.

Yes, and that would strike down.

And then two hours later when the West Coast...

That's right, and then asks the West Coast.

It had a repeat spike. So you can see down to the second pretty much what the world is thinking about.

That's an amazing kind of bit of research right there.

Yeah, it's really interesting data. There's so much information that flows through Google. It's really amazing though, there's a lot that we can do with it.

Yeah. Tell me how the face of this phenomenon is changing in terms of how you see the development of a search engine, and what kind of factors will influence its development?

Uh, big question. Okay, well I think one of the really important big questions...

Yes?

As you know, yeah, I think search is all about getting more information to more people. One of the things that we've been doing is developing internationally really aggressively. We have interfaces in about 50 languages now. We have various levels of support within those, including some translation features. So now, you know, if you're Italian and you search for things on the web and you get back English language results, they get translated to you in Italian. So it's really about bridging the world.

We also have Google available on all kinds of cell phones, WAP phones, i-mode phones in Japan. So that's all about getting information to more people. The other side of things is we try to get more and more information in there. Like now the discussion boards where we made the acquisition of the Deja Usenet archives; and that's half a billion messages collected over five years of people talking to each other about all kinds of things.

When your revenue streams come from where?

So we have two main sources. One is advertising. And we have two parts there: we sell to bigger companies, we also sell automated through credit cards and we have thousands of people just buy ads on Google using credit cards. We also make money on providing search to customers like Yahoo, Netscape. We also provide corporate search to companies like Cisco. So if you go to the Cisco website and do a search, we power that for them.

So where do you see the future then in terms of revenue streams?

Um, I think those streams will continue to really, essentially... Yeah, I think also, you know, we'd like to get streams directly from users. I think you hear that a lot from Yahoo and companies like that. I think it's a challenge right now to find things on the web that people want to pay for.

Is the nature of the information that you're in search of changing? In other words, do you have more and more access to databases?

Um, yes. The answer is undoubtedly yes. There are continuously more and more websites that we crawl. For example, we crawl all of Amazon even though it's sitting in a database that's exposed to us. And there are more and more databases which either make themselves available to us by modifying exactly how they serve things, or we actually work to get more of them online by changing how we go about crawling, which is a big part of the web search process.

Give me some... dazzle me with a number.

Oh, I'll do that. So when we started we had 30 million web pages, which was big at the time in 1998. Right now we have over 1.3 billion. 1.3 billion web pages. Actually, if you printed them out and stacked them up, it would be about 70 miles high of paper.

Wow.

So that's what you search when you search Google, and it's actually doubling roughly every year. We continue to increase the size.

It's a great story. Google is a search engine that became what it is by word of mouth in terms of people who used and recommended it, and other people recommended it, so it built its own momentum, which is the great way to go. Thank you.

Pleasure to meet you.

Thank you.

Great to be here. Thank you for joining us. See you next time.