"Inside Larry and Sergey's Brain" to be released Sept. 17, 2009
“Good luck. I’ve been trying to do that for some years.”
— Google CEO Eric Schmidt after being told the title of this book
Google has become the de facto head librarian of the world’s information; the entity that guides us through the labyrinthine web of online information, philosophy, entertainment, opinion, debate, slander, pornography, art, and worthless blather that the geeks and executives of the Internet like to lump into the single category of “content.”
To say Larry and Sergey struck the right business chord would be the understatement of the twenty-first century. When they launched Google, they were entering a war that pundits were insisting they had already lost. In mid-1998, it was Yahoo Inc. that sat on top of the World Wide Web, the place where 75 percent of Web searches were begun. More than twenty-five million people visited Yahoo every month. In September 1998, it became one of the first pure Internet companies to claim a profit.
The previous March, Fortune magazine had summed up the prevalent view: “Yahoo! has won the search-engine wars and is poised for much bigger things,” its editors declared. Its stock peaked at $230 at the end of 1999.
Then it all fell apart. By mid-2000, Yahoo’s stock was in free fall, on its way to hitting the bottom at under $5 a share. Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle, once hailed as a great Internet visionary, was a year from being fired. Nobody seemed to know what hit them. Whatever it was, it missed Google.
As the cash flow that had kept the technology world afloat reversed direction, Google seemed to catch the runoff. In 1999, Google took in revenues of $200,000. In 2000, the start of the technology recession, its sales had grown 940 percent, to $19 million. By the end of 2002, when most dot-com companies were either desperately dehydrated or dead, Google’s revenues had bloated to $440 million. In 2003, just four years old, its sales hit $1.5 billion, its profit was $100 million, and it had taken over some 80 percent of the world’s search queries.
