BUILDING A BRAND: Google's ruling trio— Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and Larry Page— looks to Legos for some inspiration
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When Google hires someone, it generally isn't for a specific job. The idea is to bring in talent that can be slotted wherever there's a need. A new Googler might be placed on a team developing search applications for mobile phones and, when that project is done, help write code for, say, a video-search prototype. Chikai Ohazama runs the team developing Google Earth, the company's mesmerizing satellite-imagery application. Ohazama, a software engineer, was a co-founder of Keyhole, the firm that developed the technology, which Google acquired two years ago. On a recent afternoon he sits with his team in a conference room brainstorming new applications. Google Earth has to be seen to be appreciated: it seamlessly brings together images of the globe taken from above. You can zoom in to see your house or pull back for a broad view of the city or the country or the world. Google is trying to figure out how to make money from the free service, and for now it is throwing engineers at the problem. It's similar to Google's origins: first perfect the technology, then figure out the business plan. Ohazama gets reports from a series of team members: a woman has figured out how to superimpose U.S. hiking trails on the images. Another is adding in ferry routes. A third reports he's struggling to get data on the terrain in Connecticut. Despite some glitches, Ohazama urges the team to press on: "It's fine to make mistakes for now," he says, "until the point where we have to turn it on."
As Google rushes forward, it's reasonable to ask whether it is making the right bets on the Internet's future. For one thing, Google has tempted Microsoft into battle by developing new Web-based software and exploring partnerships that could challenge the Seattle giant's desktop dominance. But it's Yahoo!--which has a significantly different vision--that could most threaten Google. At stake is the future of search. For Google, it is all about harnessing the vast power of the Internet to get results as quickly and accurately as possible. (Google maintains tens of thousands of servers to store all those cached Web pages it searches.)
But what if in the future, search were to become more personal, more local? We might turn more to our friends, neighbors and even strangers for opinions, recipes, travel tips and so on. That, more or less, is what Yahoo!'s bet is about. Yahoo! figures we won't be satisfied with a fat data-crunching search engine like Google's. Yahoo! is focusing instead on "social search," in which everyday Internet users pool their knowledge to create alternative systems of content that deliver more relevant results--which, of course, can be monetized.
"Yahoo! is all about the people," says Caterina Fake, co-founder of the wildly successful photo-sharing site Flickr, which Yahoo! purchased last year. Flickr symbolizes the Yahoo! approach. Its collection of tens of millions of photos is all user generated and user cataloged. Participants themselves "tag" the pictures by typing in keywords that let others search the photos. Yahoo! last year also acquired del.icio.us, a social-bookmarking website that lets users share their favorite sites, music and other findings--allowing others to effectively look over their shoulders to find interesting stuff. "We're applying the wisdom of the crowds to find information," says Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo!'s head of search technology. "It's collaborative."