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Clearly, search engines needed to be more intuitive, to rank quality over quantity. But how can a computer program understand what we think of as the good stuff? To Page and Brin this was more than an academic puzzler. Multiply the man-hours corporations spend on online research by the increasing chaos of the Web and you have millions of dollars leaking out of the economy. "If we deal with that better," says Page, "we're changing the world."
The solution was simple: treat the Internet as a democracy. Google interprets connections between websites as votes. The most linked-to sites win the Google usefulness ballot and rise to the top of search results. More weight is given to "voters" with millions of links themselves, such as Amazon or AOL. If the big hitters are pointing to your Tiger site, Google says it's cool. Popularity equals quality.
It's different, and it works--like much else about Google. Page and Brin license the Google engine to other dotcoms, but they charge per search instead of the usual flat rate, which is why they expect to turn a profit soon. They built the site with parts from 6,000 off-the-shelf PCs--huge, unruly piles of spaghetti wiring and lasagna-layered motherboards that actually run cheaper and faster than mess-free, million-dollar servers. And they refuse to offer the top-heavy extras you'll find crammed onto every other major search engine (stock quotes, sports scores and e-mail). The whole point of Google is to get you on and off the site as fast as possible.
As Google's rivals scramble to imitate its best features--Ask Jeeves, for one, now offers popularity rankings--it's worth remembering how recently another pair of Stanford grads seemed similarly unrivaled: David Filo and Jerry Yang of Yahoo. "The darkest cloud on your horizon is if a couple of students come up with something even better," Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani told former student Page over dinner recently. No, replied Page, that will never happen. Still, you can forgive him a little hubris. Enough massages and free ice cream can make anyone feel invincible.