chloeveltman.com > features

Right royal Google
19 April 2001

On the ball: Larry Page's Google has
a 'mission' to 'organise the world's
information'

By concentrating on the clever and the useful, Larry Page has helped create the king of search engines which can find anything from Plato's Republic to a poodle parlour in Maidenhead. Chloe Veltman meets him

Larry Page, a 28-year-old graduate of the University of Michigan, is half of the brains behind Google, the internet search engine which is the Manchester United of its sector.

Of the many internet search engines, which produce 12,879,455 matches for your inquiry to find a local flower shop but no useful ones, Google is king (and queen and, in fact, the entire royal family).

Unlike many rivals, Google is a useful search engine. It actually finds what you want quite a lot, rather than millions of links to totally irrelevant information. It is a clever search engine, compared to the many dunces in the rest of the class.

This is because Google works differently to many other engines. Rather than just searching for pages that contain the requested search terms, it decides which pages are relevant by counting the number of links to them.

The more users that link to a site, the more reliable it is by Google's standards and the more likely it is to appear near the top of the results list. This is why a search for "The Daily Telegraph" brings up our site in a nano-second right near the top of the list, rather than a bunch of random pages that contain the terms "daily" and "telegraph".

A computer in the lobby of Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, occasionally flashes with a list of all the current search requests hitting the site. I spot "Plato's Republic" and "poodle parlours in Maidenhead". "Searching is one of the most important functions on the web, second only to email," says Page, who looks like a surprising candidate to run a powerful company. It feels as if the softly-spoken twentysomething would find his natural habitat in a research laboratory.

Sadly, it is not perfect. Google, he admits, has a long way to go before becoming "the ultimate search engine", and the one "where the computer instinctively understands exactly what you're looking for when you plug in your search terms".

It particularly frustrates Page that Google's search engine, which currently scans a formidable 1.3 billion pages on the web within a second, cannot gain access to more of the web. Some websites, such as The New York Times and CNN, cannot be searched beyond the limits of the site itself. "I am worried about whether the web really is an open medium because our product relies on having access to everything on the web," says Page.

It is certainly not a bad achievement for Page who came up with the idea while studying at Stanford University in California. It is not quite a computer-developed-in-a-garage idea, but it is on its way.

Page met his co-founder Sergey Brin, 27, who is from Moscow, while they were both studying for a PhD in computer science at Stanford a few years ago. The Google business, founded in 1998, evolved out of this business. The name is a play on the word "googol" which refers to the number represented by one followed by 100 zeros.

Google was founded in 1998. "When we were setting it up, all we had to do was wander around the department talking to people. We didn't have to go beyond a three-mile radius of the university to find every thing we needed."

Two years later, the company is not shy in its "mission" to "organise the world's information". Since an equity round raising $25m (£18m) in June 1999, Google remains a privately-held company, which is probably a relief in these days of dramatically declining technology stocks. As well as the "yooful" Page-Brin duo, it also has two serial internet directors on its board, Michael Moritz and John Doerr, who between them share seats on the boards of companies such as Yahoo!, Amazon.com and Sun Microsystems. Google hopes to be profitable by the third quarter of this year.

Technology has always been part of Page's life. Both his parents taught computer science, and his elder brother, who runs a San Francisco-based email company called eGroups, taught Page about computing when he was young.

When he was six, his family bought a home computer, the Exidy Sorcerer, which now looks like a vast old beast of a machine, for which his brother designed the operating system. With the help of a dot matrix printer and a homemade typing programme, Page was able to hand in word-processed homework, the first his school had ever seen. He's that sort of guy, if you know what I mean.

At just 28, Page's schooldays are not too distant a memory, and his office has more teenage appeal than most chief executive's lairs. It is mildly chaotic with papers and gadgets strewn across every available surface. An austere cream leather sofa attempts to endow the little room with a veneer of sensible chief executive-ness, but the Mindstorms Lego set and micro scooter propped up against the door give the game away. Page has not one but three computer screens: one for his schedule, one for email and one for his browser.

The rest of the office is equally playful. Indeed, walking through Google's building is like taking a tour around Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory without Verucca Salt to annoy you. There are lava lamps on every table top, and enormous bouncing balls littered around the office. Only the grey styrofoam ceiling tiles reveal a trace of the building's previous tenants, a bio-pharmaceutical company that recently decamped to Sunnyvale. In fact, Google's office environment lives the dotcom cliche. Its 200 employees eat for free at the company's organic cafeteria, take part in twice-weekly hockey games and play the baby grand piano in reception. There are self-service snack stations scattered about the building, stuffed with buckets of M&Ms, granola bars and 10 varieties of smoothie for the peckish programmers and sales staff. About a fifth of Google's staff hold doctoral degrees.

"Offices are going to become nicer and nicer places to work," prophesies Page. If mid-afternoon piano concerts and organic coq au vin seem a touch over-extravagant for the work place, he tells the story of his grandfather, who was an assembly line worker in a car factory. During strikes, he was forced to carry weapons to protect himself. Page has kept the hammer that his grandfather used to carry to work with him every day. "I like to think we've come a long way since then," he says.