Google: a successful search

Stefan Stern looks at the popular search engine and asks why web surfers have come to rely so heavily on the curiously-named phenomenon

On the last Monday in July this year, something absolutely appalling and unthinkable happened: Google's website went down. It was hit by the MyDoom.0 virus (or, more properly, 'worm'), and suddenly millions of internet users around the world were thrown back into the dark ages. Not since the fire which destroyed the great library at Alexandria in 48BC had such damage been done to intellectual life on the planet.

Fortunately, today's high tech world offers up speedy solutions. There was no need to rebuild a library. Within a few hours Google was up and running again. But a horrifying glimpse of a few Google-less hours made it plain just how important this Californian-based search engine company has become.

By the time you read this, Google's initial public offering (IPO) of shares should have taken place, raising as much as $36bn of equity capital, and creating a paper fortune for Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, of $8bn, each. But how have two self-confessed geeks turned this neat idea into a giant of the internet?

To answer these questions we have to go back to 1995, when most of us had no idea that something called the internet even existed. It was at a meeting of Stanford University PhD computer science candidates that Brin and Page first met. After producing some software for a search engine called BackRub in 1996/7, which was a precursor to Google, the two founders started their own company, supported by the co-founder of Yahoo! (and fellow Stanford alumnus) David Filo.

(To the uninitiated, if there are any left, a search engine is a computer programme that trawls through the internet finding relevant websites containing information required by the user. Google is the pre-eminent search engine. 48% of US internet users prefer Google. Yahoo! is second with 20%, Microsoft has 14%. Google receives 200m queries a day, and can search over four billion web pages.)

But back in 1997, Brin and Page interrupted their studies, and raised $1m in funding from family, friends, and supporters to start Google. On 7 September 1998 Google was incorporated and moved to its first office, in a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. The firm had four employees. At this time Google was responding to 10,000 search queries per day.

In 1999, after receiving a further $25m in equity funding, Google won the backing of AOL/Netscape, which decided to use Google as its search engine. In the same year Google moved its headquarters to Mountain View, California. Now the firm had 39 employees and carried out three million searches per day.

By 2000 Google's ascendancy was complete. It was established as the number one search engine on the internet, and answered more than 60m searches a day. The following year Page and Brin felt it necessary to bring in a new chief executive to manage the next stage of Google's growth and development. This was Eric Schmidt, chairman and chief executive of IT company Novell, and former chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems. By the end of 2001 Google was performing 100m searches a day. Google's amazing growth story continued. In April this year the firm announced plans for a much-awaited IPO.

Google's success story is based both on technology and word-of-mouth endorsement - a word-of-mouth factor which, in the internet era, spreads around the world almost instantly. The technology side is difficult to explain in lay terms. But the secret of Google's success lies in its use of 'algorithms'. An algorithm is a step-by-step problem-solving procedure (in this case a computational procedure) for solving a problem in a finite number of steps.

According to Wired magazine, Google uses 100 or so closely guarded algorithms to produce its search results. The best known algorithm is called PageRank, which identifies the relevance of a web page according to the number and importance of pages linked to it ('hyperlinks'), the number and importance of pages linked to each of those pages, and so on. (Other, more primitive search engines turn up lots of irrelevant information, and lay themselves open to clever manipulation by webmasters looking to increase their own site's rankings.)

But just as important as the technological success has been the support of internet users. Hardened web surfers are a very particular breed, often highly sceptical of corporations, and possessing keen antennae for anything phoney or corrupt. That Google has won the backing of the net community speaks highly for its corporate ethos and authenticity, as well as its technological sophistication (compare the attitude of web users to Linux's open source software with what they think of big, bad Microsoft).

Naïvety

Google's avowed corporate mission is simply this: 'don't do evil'. From its launch there has been a youthful naïvety about Google, which has sometimes led it into difficulties. So powerful is its software that certain governments, most notably China's, have become uncomfortable at the power of its search facility. Google reaches parts of the internet some politicians would rather it didn't. Similarly, some religious groups have complained when Google has prevented users reaching their web pages. Sergey Brin acts as a moral guardian for Google, trying to stay true to its mission. This has led him to ban tobacco and alcohol advertising on Google - the site makes its money from discreet adverts - but not, funnily enough, to ban ads for and links to porn sites.

It was the firm's quest for the authentic, and desire to avoid getting ripped off by investment banks, that led it to choose the so-called 'Dutch auction' model for its IPO. Whereas a lot of dot.com companies felt the banks had played a dodgy game in floating previous new businesses, allowing share prices to soar only to collapse again on instant profit-taking, the auction model allows individuals to bid for as tiny an amount as five shares, paying what they believe to be a fair price. This creates a level playing field for small and institutional investors.

Google is an iconic creation of the internet age, perhaps the most powerful symbol of what the new technology makes possible. Most people who work with PCs today cannot really imagine life without it - or at least would not want to. It is the encyclopaedia on your desk-top, the gateway to the sum of the world's knowledge.

From the early days of furtively asking friends and colleagues: 'Do you Google?', to the 11 September Commission in the US, which suggested that a smarter use of Google might have helped avoid the catastrophe of al-Qaeda's attack, Google is everywhere. Yes: we have all been Googled. It is truly mind-boggling... or should that be mind-googling?

Stefan Stern is a regular contributor to the specialist press and writer on work, management and industrial issues.