Can Google Stay Google?

Challenge the Mind

Brin enters the conference room and takes a seat on the same side of the table as you, and it's hard to focus on the interview while you're forced to look at his bare legs. He's wearing athletic short-shorts. Soon he senses your discomfort and apologizes for his attire, mentioning that he had just come from playing in a volleyball game. He also wears a black T-shirt, a wristwatch made from Lego blocks, and Adidas sandals without socks.

"Here's the way I think of it," he says. "Is this the place I would want to work if I were graduating from a PhD program now?" Brin and Larry Page were pursuing doctorates at Stanford when they founded Google, which they now run together with Eric Schmidt, a veteran executive who had worked at Sun and Novell.

"Yes," he answers. Why? The key reason is that Google lets brilliant computer scientists work on "great technical problems" that provide the intellectual stimulation and challenge they crave. "Artificial intelligence, complex systems, user interface -- all the things I studied as a graduate student, we hit the limits of," he says.

In Google's early days, simply searching the Web was a daunting technical challenge. Today, Google conceives of "search" as something much broader and more grandly ambitious -- no less than helping people access, analyze, organize, understand, and grapple with all the world's information. That kind of audacious long-term challenge is really exciting and inspiring to the most technically brilliant minds. Making money and achieving professional status are significant for them, of course, but so are the psychic rewards of the work itself and its potential impact and visibility out in the world.

"We're in a target-rich environment of interesting problems," says Alan Eustace, one of Google's handful of vice presidents of engineering and its head of research. Take the technology for "machine translation" of human language. Right now, Google can automatically translate Web pages from English into a bunch of major languages and vice versa -- German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. The list will get longer in the next year or two. But that's just the beginning, Eustace says: "The goal is to make the Internet language-independent." Ultimately, all search results will come back instantly in your own language, regardless of what tongue you speak -- and what dialect the pages are written in. Every Google user will be like a delegate in the General Assembly of the United Nations putting on headphones to hear translations of the speaker up front. At the UN, it doesn't matter whether you speak only French and the orator is waxing eloquent in Chinese. The Web will be the same way.

Automated universal translation is the kind of long-range vision that inspires people like Eustace. It fascinates them because it's a technical Mount Everest that they can climb, but also because it's an idealistic goal that's potentially enriching to global society. "In the long term, if you can create technology that can unify information around the world and remove the language barrier, that would be very special," he says.

Google has visions of unifying the world's data as well as its languages. Eustace wants to give people the tools to combine data from multiple sources on the Web. For example, if you were looking to buy a home today, it would be easy enough to map the available properties. But what if you wanted to overlay that map with other information that could help you make your decision -- figures about school rankings, economic conditions, day-care availability, community activities, or crime rates? "We're not anywhere near done with search technology," says Marissa Mayer, who left Stanford's PhD program to become Google's first female engineer in 1999 and currently manages its consumer Web products. "2010 or 2020 will make today look really sad."

Google has recruited technologists who share this vision, which is an important source of their dedication. Before coming to Google, Anurag Acharya taught computer science at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "I was looking for a problem that would last me a very long time -- 10 years, 15 years," he says. He joined the company motivated by tackling the issue of "being able to deal with information coherently in all its manifestations." Like Eustace, Acharya seems equally influenced by Google's vast technical challenge as well as its potentially beneficial social impact. He expressed his idealism with his creation of Google Scholar, a feature that lets users search for information in academic publications. As principal engineer on Scholar, he spent four years recruiting scholarly journals to make their material publicly available over the Web for the first time. He thinks giving people around the world better access to information "has to fundamentally change how social processes evolve -- how people interact, how they develop organizations. I believe this is a significant thing for humanity."