Search And Destroy

RANDI LYNN BEACH/AP
Google's co-founders, CEO Larry Page and Chairman Sergey Brin

The first director of the great library of Alexandria was a very smart man, and we all owe him a big debt of gratitude. When he showed up for work on his first day that was around 300 B.C. he realized he had 500,000 papyrus scrolls and no way to organize them. He had stumbled on an important truth: You can have more information at your fingertips than any other human being in history, but it won't do you much good if you can't find the piece you want. He solved the problem by ordering the scrolls alphabetically, a principle that survives to this day. Too bad his name was Zenodotus.

Today we're all Zenodotuses. Each of us has access to more data than anybody has ever had before, but still the trick is to find what we want when we want it. Given the size of the Internet estimates run around 500 billion documents and counting that's no easy task. Internet surfers do about 550 million Web searches a day. Amass that many people anywhere doing anything and somebody is going to try to sell them something. The market for advertising to those Web searchers is worth about $2 billion, and it's growing at a rate of 35% a year far outpacing any other advertising medium. What's more, Google, the reigning sultan of search, is looking vulnerable. The combination of big money and big opportunity has attracted some mighty big players, including Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon. There's a street fight brewing over Internet search that will make the browser wars look like thumb wrestling.

But for a minute forget about the big numbers, the millions of customers and the billions of dollars. Think about what's at stake culturally and socially in the search wars, and all those zeros start looking pretty paltry by comparison. The Internet is swiftly becoming the primary repository of the bulk of human information. Search is the way we get at that information, and companies like Google wield enormous power. They reflect our common interests and shape how we learn about the world with their rapid-fire search results. This isn't just about dotcom juggernauts duking it out for stock options and bragging rights. Whoever wins the search wars owns the keys to the kingdom of knowledge. That's a big responsibility. Are search engines up to it?

It's kind of surprising to think that for most of the 1990s, very large corporations fought for the privilege of helping us search the Web. After all, there was no money in it, at least not directly searching is free. Everybody assumed that one day somebody would figure out a way to reap dollars from it. But what's even more surprising is that the first round of the search wars was won by two twentysomething Stanford graduate students named Sergey Brin and Larry Page. In 1998 Brin and Page invented a new kind of search engine, one that assessed the importance of a Web page based not on a simple keyword search but on how many and what kinds of websites link to that Web page. Their approach delivered search results that creamed the competition's, and it served them up in a simple, quick-loading, no-frills format. It was a stone-cold category killer. Brin and Page called their search engine Google. "It was fun, it was short, it was reasonably easy to spell," Page remembers. "We like doing big things, and googol [the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros] is a huge number."

Today Google is a highly unusual company, one run by true technologists with a genuine love of banging on things, shaking and breaking them, and making them better. Behind the simple, unassuming Google home page is a wizard's workshop of experimentation, much of it useless, some of it brilliant. "Invariably we try 10 things that don't quite work out in order to do one thing that's successful," says Page, who speaks in a slow, deeply nerdy, singsong voice. "And we learn a lot in doing the 10 things that didn't quite work." For example, you can call a phone number in California it's 650-318-0165--and do a Google search over the phone. Why would you ever want to? Who knows? Or go to catalogs.google.com , and you'll discover a service that searches 6,000 mail-order catalogs for you. Some lost soul at Google literally sits there and scans catalogs

Do they even make money from it? "No," Page admits affably. "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. And catalogs are part of the world's information." But let's get this straight, you aren't doing this stuff altruistically, for the general good of humanity, are you? "Well, we kind of are. We always kind of figured that if we did a good job of providing the right information for everybody in the world, all the time, that would be an important thing to do."

That kind of attitude should have sent Page and Brin directly to the Home for Penniless Geniuses, but instead they have managed to build one of the strongest brands on the Internet this despite the fact that when they started, they knew nothing about marketing. "That was true," says Page, laughing delightedly. "I guess we were really lucky, you know?" Whatever they did, it worked better than their rivals' approach. Remember how hard Yahoo tried to turn its brand name into an everyday word those TV ads with the guy with the big Afro asking "Do you Yahoo?" If you do Yahoo, you probably don't call it that. But chances are you Google.