Larry Page's Google 3.0

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Pichai sees no such conflict and says he's not building software to suit the conventional wisdom. "Some things give you an easier way out of the door because you are doing something that fits into the hot category of the moment," he says. "I want to know that we are building something that people will find useful." While the upcoming range of tablets and set-top boxes all run Android, Pichai isn't forfeiting that fight, either. "We are building a software layer which will work across every type of hardware over time," he says.

That suggests Rubin and Pichai are direct competitors. Both of them insist, however, that while they are approaching the same problem with different visions, they share a "deep mutual respect," as Pichai says. "I don't think you can do things like this outside of Google," he says.

Lord of the Engine Room

Last October, Google's effort to streamline and accelerate decision-making reached its most important division—search. Marissa Mayer, one of the group's longtime leaders, left search to lead Google's effort to go after the growing market for local services. The search engine, which had been run by two groups, products and engineering, was unified under the control of former Amazon.com (AMZN) executive Udi Manber.

Manber shuns the spotlight, so representing search often falls to his deputy, Amit Singhal. Singhal, 42, an excitable and expressive search scientist from Jhansi, India, became Google employee No. 190 in 2000 and has for the past decade run the ranking and relevancy algorithms—the engine room that for 12 years has made Google search outrun its rivals. Singhal works from Building 43, the geeky hub of the world's geekiest company, where a real spaceship hangs from the ceiling and employees can be seen on their breaks playing the complex fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering.

Singhal insists that even a division as large as search, with thousands of engineers, is responding to Page's call to accelerate the pace of innovation. "Search quality has gone up at a speed which I have never witnessed in my career," Sing hal says of the last few years.

The search engine, like much else at Google, has been under attack recently. Marketers and some technology industry bloggers say it is returning more links to spammy sites such as cheaply produced content mills and user-generated question-and-answer pages. "Searching Google is now like asking a question in a crowded flea market of hungry, desperate, sleazy salesmen who all claim to have the answer to every question you ask," wrote entrepreneur Marco Arment in a widely read post on his blog earlier this month.

While Singhal disputes this sentiment, Google has recently moved to address the complaints. A blog post on Jan. 21 from Matt Cutts, who shares an office with Singhal, pledged to penalize companies that churn out pages with low-quality content and then try to fool Google's technology in order to appear prominently in search results. When The New York Times exposed a fraudulent eyeglass merchant in December that was featured high in Google search results, Sing hal assembled a team that in three days came up with a batch of "signals," or indications that could better discriminate between dishonest merchants and legitimate ones. He says such sellers are now heavily penalized and nearly invisible in Google's results.

If there's a broad call at the company to integrate social networking features, Singhal hasn't quite heard it. He seems skeptical about whether social data can make search results significantly more relevant. If he's searching for a new kind of dishwasher, he argues, his friend's recommendations are interesting, but the cumulative opinion of experts manifested in search results is much more valuable. He notes that Google already integrates content from Twitter and says social networking data is easily manipulated. Can social context make search more relevant? "Maybe, maybe not. Social is just one signal. It's a tiny signal," he says.

How social media will and won't change Google's world is an ongoing conversation at Google's weekly Execute meetings—and it underscores Larry Page's biggest problem as Google's new CEO. Page values strong, idiosyncratic leaders who know their domains and have their own aggressive agendas. All these rising stars have to work together. The mobile team has to coordinate with the nascent local and e-commerce groups. Rubin's app-based Android vision of the future has to square with Pichai's push for the wide-open Web of Chrome OS; and Singhal's search division has to find common ground with Vic Gundotra and the new czars of social. Can they integrate their plans while satisfying Larry Page's need for speed? At some point, Page may have to dispense with the philosophical discussions, put some limits on the open atmosphere of geeky experimentation, and make some tough decisions. It's not very "Googley." But it's the central challenge of Google 3.0.

With Peter Burrows and Douglas MacMillan. Stone is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek.