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BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE: Business Week ebiz | |||||||||||||||||
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Can Google's Prodigies Make a Search Tool Pay? Sergey Brin and Larry Page insist that their math wizardry and magical search results can compete with the entertainment-heavy portals Suppose you had a search engine that could steer straight through the oceans of inanities on the Net. The Web's meandering masses would soon make a beeline for it, clamoring for their daily fix of relevant search results. It would be manna for the mind, and everyone would love it. But would you have a business? That's the question Larry Page and Sergey Brin will soon have to answer. Last week, after months of testing, the two 26-year-old PhD candidates from Stanford University formally launched what many experts consider to be the most powerful search tool on the Net, called Google. Its edge over other search engines lies in sophisticated mathematics for analyzing links among hundreds of millions of Web pages, and then ranking the pages by relative importance.
But at a time when other popular search sites such as Yahoo!, Excite, and Lycos have all morphed into diversified entertainment portals, is there really a future for a pure, advertising-supported search tool? Larry Page looks at the question this way: "There are close to a billion pages on the Web today," and the world is looking at orders-of-magnitude increases in volume. "Every time you have a change measuring three orders of magnitude, your current technology won't be effective." NOT A COMMODITY. That, in a nutshell, is the elusive logic behind Google -- a play on the mathematical term "googol," meaning a one followed by 100 zeros. Google peers into a future where there will be so many Web pages that conventional search engines will be useless, thus raising the value of software that can deliver. "Excite, Inktomi, and Yahoo! are not really interested in search," Page maintains. "They think it's a commodity, but that won't turn out to be correct." The proof that people really care, he says, is in the traffic reports. In July, a Nielsen//NetRatings report showed Google posting an 88% month-on-month increase in unique visitors, compared with low single-digit growth for the top 10 portals. "We're doing 4 million searches a day, averaging 50% growth each month," Page says, "and all of that is based on word of mouth." Admiration may be satisfying. But Google can't charge a fee while others give search away for free. So for now, Google's plan is to extract revenues from advertising that's targeted to users' individual tastes. A Google user whose search reflects an interest in cooking, for example, may see an all-text ad for a cookbook from Amazon.com. This will be subtle, Brin insists, and won't result in clutter on Google's Spartan site, or in slower search speeds. "We won't do ordinary banner ads," he insists. The two started their company two years ago while they were students at Stanford in computer science -- studies that they have suspended. They have no experience in running a business. But they're computer prodigies. Brin, for instance, a native of Moscow, has multiple degrees in computer science from the University of Maryland and Stanford. And Page gets his knack from his father, a computer science professor, and started using computers when he was 6.
The math to accomplish all this isn't trivial. As Page and Brin describe it, PageRank assigns importance by means of a mathematical algorithm that solves an equation containing 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. The technique, in other words, succeeds by computational brute force. But other scientists say this is not the only way to locate relevant information. In fact, some companies and research labs are backing away from heavily computational tools that are grounded in artificial intelligence. For instance, Boston-based startup Abuzz, a subsidiary of the New York Times Co., uses the Web as a database of human expertise and tries to connect people who have questions with other people who have answers via e-mail. "If you think of any task or problem a person is trying to solve that involves information, chances are that somebody else has solved the same problem before," says Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab professor Pattie Maes. To Sergey Brin, the distinctions among these approaches are largely academic. Expertise is what PageRank is all about, he says. "We are tapping the intelligence of all the people on the Web." And as long as cybernauts care about the relevance of their search results, he's convinced that they will find Google irresistible. Senior Writer Gross covers technology in New York. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
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Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page WEB POINTERS Click here to visit sites mentioned in the story: Sequoia Capital Kleiner Perkins Yahoo! Excite Lycos Inktomi Nielsen//NetRatings Abuzz MIT Media Lab | ||||||||||||
