|
|
|
THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING
|
TALKING SEARCH TECHNOLOGY Eric Schmidt Chairman and CEO, Google Inc. By Robert Weisman, Globe Staff, 2/4/2002
Google has been known mostly for its search and sorting technology. What are you doing to capitalize on the brand to build a business?
Well, a couple of things. The company began by selling search to partners, such as Yahoo. And there are many others, more than 150 or so, people who have us searching on their behalf. We return answers as they ask us questions; we also bill them on a per-query basis.
Then the company invented this notion of very targeted ads. And so, for example, if you type "digital camera" (into the google.com search box), we will show an ad for a digital camera that is text-based. We run a very simple text ad that is very targeted. The problem with most of the advertising models that previously existed on the Internet is that they weren't very useful. They were, like, copies of television ads, and that didn't work. ... I think most of our success has come because of those two things. So as a result of that, we're profitable and we're growing quickly. ... I think the combination of powering the search of others and advertising looks like a pretty good business model for the foreseeable future.
How much more innovation is to come in the field of search?
There's lots of ways to improve search. When I went to the company [Google], people said, `Well, search?' I mean, they said, `Well, aren't you doing more than search?' It was kind of this presumption that search is not a very interesting area.
But let me ask you: What do you do on the Internet? In your job, you search. And you search everything, right? You probably spend half your time searching, and the other half of your time sending e-mail. So it turns out search is a really important thing. We have hundreds of millions of queries a day, which is sort of mind-boggling. You know, if you watch it long enough, the different queries show how diverse the world is.
So the obvious questions is: Where does Google go from here? And the answer is ... search. Let me give you an example: Are all the world's governments' documents online? Can you search all the government records of all the countries in which you're an international correspondent? No. Wouldn't your life be more effective, wouldn't information transfer be better, if all the information was online? Absolutely. What about all those premium services? I'm thinking of, like, the LexisNexis types. Wouldn't it be nice if some of that information were online and available in an integrated form? Maybe you'd have to pay for it in some way, we haven't figured it out yet. ... The mission of the company is [retrieving] all of the world's information. It's not all the world's information currently available on the Web, it's all of the world's information. So what I do is I sit down every day and I think about, `What information do I need to get through the day and why isn't it on Google?' And, you know, you just lop one [thing] off after another.
Is there still room for new entrants that could challenge Google in the search arena?
I think that remains to be seen. Switching costs are relatively low. In another words, if there was somebody who came along that was significantly better, then it would be relatively easy for our customers to switch to the new [competitor]. So that kind of keeps us on our toes.
[But] it is difficult to build the networks and the servers and the data and the performance that we have built over the last few years. It's not impossible, but it's difficult. And, of course, the underlying algorithms that Google uses are patented. So, it seems to me that in order to attack Google competitively, you would have to come out with a completely different approach. And the solution to that [for Google] is to continue to hire the best and the brightest 23-year-olds out of the very best universities and make sure that we really do know what the current thinking is.
Is it true the Google infrastructure is based on Linux (the open-source operating system) running on personal computers?
Yes, it turns out that it's Linux and PCs that are built by hand. Which I find sort of moderately disturbing because, in my career, I've spent 20 years making that not be the correct answer. And yet it turns out that the PC is the best choice because we use desktop components and we have so many PCs that we buy incredibly cheaply. ... And Linux has a number of [advantages], including the fact that all the undergraduates coming out of the top universities now are Linux programmers. And it doesn't cost anything. So it has two things going for it.
Other search engines let businesses buy their way to a higher ranking on their search lists? Has Google ever considered going that route?
Why would you choose to use a service where money had been used to influence the outcome? In the newspaper industry, you don't allow your advertisers to write the stories. I think there's a high similarity between the way Google approaches this and the way a proper newspaper approaches this problem. I can tell you that our business does not influence our [search] results. And I know because our technology enforces it. There's no humans that can be corrupted or confused on this. It's the rule, and that's how we do business.
This story ran on page D1 of the Boston Globe on 2/4/2002.
|