USA TODAY: Google: The Search Engine That Could

Makes me wish I would have studied more.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2003-08-25-google_x.htm

The search engine that could

By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Susan Wojcicki remembers when two Stanford students came to rent a room in her house in September 1998 for a new dot-com enterprise.
It was a system for searching the Internet, one that they claimed was more effective than any other. "My reaction was, 'OK, good luck. The rent's $1,700 a month, and don't forget to separate the recycling,' " she says.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin and their brainstorm, Google, quickly outgrew her home. Today, the founders and their landlady — who wound up quitting her job at Intel to join the boys — are in different wings of the four-building sprawling campus known as the Googleplex, a 1,000-employee paradise with free food, unlimited ice cream, pool and ping-pong tables and complimentary massages, plus the ability to spend 20% of work time on any outside activity. "They built Google to be their dream environment," Wojcicki says.

And Google, in five years, has gone on to dominate Internet searching like nothing else. Rivals have been left in the dust — or became Google customers, including Yahoo and AOL, which license the technology and route search queries through Google. (Related: Google faces powerful competitors).

Odds are that if you're on the Web, sometime within the next few minutes, you'll be using Google. Google, for example, powers the search engine on USATODAY.com.

Overall, Google "represents 75% of all searches," says Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Watch online newsletter (searchenginewatch.com). "It's gotten to the point where people think if it's not in Google, it doesn't exist."

Today, millions Google themselves, friends, blind dates, employers and employees. Students wait till the last minute to Google assignments. Shoppers Google products and prices before purchasing. One columnist suggested that Google is so vital in our lives that it's a deity of sorts, everywhere and all-knowing.

As Google prepares to celebrate its fifth anniversary Sept. 7, it's expanding beyond basic searches. Google now embraces comparison shopping, news, the personal online journals called Weblogs and even a service that blocks pesky pop-up ads. It answers 200 million search requests a day — more than 2,300 every second — in 88 languages. It indexes 3.1 billion Web pages with the help of 10,000 supercomputers.

The aim: to organize the world's information.

"We've been very lucky," says Page, 30, wearing black Google-logo T-shirt and jeans during an interview at the Googleplex, where bicycles, Segways and hammocks line the hallways and the Grateful Dead's former chef oversees the 24-hour food operation. "We've made a tremendous amount of progress, but we have so much more we can do."

Google at 5 "is beyond anything I would have pondered extrapolating," says Brin, 30. "The most amazing thing is seeing how important search is to people in all walks of life."

Take, for example, Havva Eisenbaum. She Googles people "every day" — friends she went to school with, old boyfriends, new clients, buddies she meets via instant messages.

"I don't know what I'd do without it," says Eisenbaum, 25, who works at a Hollywood talent agency and as an SAT tutor. When she books new students, she looks up their parents first. "I want to make sure they're not crazy," she says. "I always find stuff, too."

When users type in names or subjects at www.google.com, results pop up in seconds: a list of links to Web sites and discussion boards on which the name or subject are mentioned.

With the Web at 6 billion pages and growing, organizing the chaos is an increasingly daunting task. Yahoo was the first major enterprise to tame the Net with a highly regarded directory of Web sites vetted by a team of editors. But to cover the larger Web, Yahoo had to look to outside sources for software that "crawled" Web pages and indexed them by keywords.

Savvy Webmasters found ways to exploit Web crawlers by sticking multiple keywords into the background language of pages. Search results often were skewed.

Steven Johnson, who writes for Slate.com, says the link system is skewed because Web users who create many pages and generate many links, such as Webloggers, tend to rise to the top of the list. Google "reflects the biases of the overall Web population," he says.

Google staffers concede its mechanisms aren't perfect. "We've come a long way, but we believe search is in its infancy," says Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer products. "We need more content and ways to interact with search. For instance, you can't ask a question and have it answer you."

Google bases its results on popularity, judging pages by the links to them from other sites. The larger the links (influential sites that get lots of traffic), the higher the page is listed among results. Google (named for the "googol," the mathematical term for 1 followed by 100 zeros) calls this the PageRank — named after Page.

The technology not only proved far more effective in delivering pertinent results, but it also was lightning fast. A search for a popular topic such as the California recall election retrieves more than 1 million links in a fifth of a second.

The system was born when Brin, a Russian émigré, met Page when both were PhD candidates at Stanford. He and Page, the son of a computer science professor at Michigan State University, decided to merge their graduate projects on search technology.

The two knew they had something when 10,000 fellow students and professors started using it regularly. Stanford still owns a small piece of Google, which stands to be worth a fortune if Google goes public as expected next year.

Google always has explained its success by its singular focus. "We never strayed from search," Page says. But the horizons of those searches have been broadening in the past year or so, including:

• A test comparison shopping site, Froogle (froogle.google.com). On the regular Google, Wojcicki says, "if you type in china, you'll more likely get the country than the dish. This is a way around that."

• A test news site that assembles and categorizes reports from more than 4,000 sources worldwide (news.google.com).

• The purchase of Blogger, a site for the increasingly popular Weblogs. Page says blogs fall in line with Google's pursuit of information. "If you search a plane crash, we'll give you a site about the plane and news articles about what happened. Now we can also bring you to personal Web pages to tell you how people feel about it."

Everett Ward, assistant director of the Salt Lake City library, says the danger in researchers relying so much on Google and online information is that much of it is unsourced and inaccurate. "One of the problems with online searching is trying to understand the credibility and authority of what they're looking at. Google sends you everything. People still come to the library to research, not because they can't find it online, but they're finding too much."

In her fifth-grade classroom in Atlanta, Amy Wilson worries that Google "doesn't teach (students) the basic skills they need, because they're getting quicker access in a shorter amount of time. They hardly go to the library or encyclopedia anymore."

Page says he wants people to still frequent libraries, even if it is "a lot easier to go to Google first."

Google is well compensated for its success. Analysts estimate Google's revenue at $600 million to $800 million this year from advertising and licensing fees. Small sponsored links are served to surfers along with search results, and many Web sites pay to let users search their domains via Google.

Though the founders don't have to put in the time, they still work long Silicon Valley hours. Wojcicki says that even with their newfound wealth, Brin and Page are fabulously eccentric.

"Sergey's car broke down recently, and instead of getting it fixed, he either bummed a ride home with other employees or rollerbladed to work." Page says his only extravagances have been boy toys, including a high-definition video camcorder and a $2,000 digital camera.

Meanwhile, Google already has outgrown the Googleplex and plans to move to a bigger facility. And more competition looms: Yahoo this year purchased search engine Inktomi, which provides searches for Microsoft's MSN, and Overture, Google's main rival in paid search marketing. MSN also says it will upgrade its own service to reduce reliance on outside providers. Yahoo hasn't commented on its future with Google.

Page's response to the competition is quietly confident: "Search is going to get a lot more interesting. And that's all to the good. We're a society that's used to losing information to new generations. Now more than ever, search is really important."