Sergey Brin is a last minute addition to the Web 2.0 program. John Battelle questioning him. Notes as they happen, no guarantee against mistakes of course.
Q: How do you handle being a grad student and then going to this? How’s your head?
A: We are very fortunate – a lot of luck was involved. Worked on search not because we thought it was a great business opportunity – followed our hearts. Thought about open-sourcing the code but was difficult because of computational resources required – needed to make money, so we started a company.
Q: Been a dialogue, Google’s come up once or twice. Conversation with Terry Semel – tech is extraordinary, but let’s judge Google as a portal. “Google is number 4.” How do you respond to that?
A: Based on my reading of that, that makes us the underdog.
Q: Asked Microsoft about Google – they said ‘we’re the underdog now’. Do you see Microsoft as an underdog?
A: Would be excited to be viewed as a leader in terms of technology. Not the number 1 company in terms of doing big business deals, in terms of technology development however, we are a leader.
Q: Also have the highest search share, of course – extraordinary monetization, P/E ratio. Comfortable with this?
A: I don’t consider myself a vaulation expert – many complicated ways to value companies. In terms of search market share, I’m delighted. Primarily spread through word of mouth. People come to Google because of the search experience.
Q: Portal issue – success based on clean, blank UI. Is that going to continue?
A: I certainly hope we’ll continue to be clean, but there are other products out there. GMail, for instance, rose out of frustration with our inability to manage our own e-mail. Also helped users of other webmail systems – quotas have grown because of Google. Think that we have a lot of technologies that allows us to help in many areas, would be foolish to not help in this area.
Q: Covered Microsoft back in the 1990s – Microsoft would turn around and incorporate a new company’s feature into the OS. You announced a feed reader today, which concerned many companies with feed readers. Do you consider this, how do you make a decision of what to add to the Google Suite?
A: Don’t know what will happen to the feed reader but this will likely spur a lot of investment and M&A activity in the space. Like to spur, enable other businesses – AdSense plays a part of this. We created a better system than the banners out there – and then, when the bottom fell out of banners we were left with what we had built, and it’s done very well. Brought this program to other search sites but to many other sites as well. We were worried about content disappearing from the web – there were sites that I liked that were shutting down – wanted to give them a business model. Competing services have been able to get funding based on existing money from AdSense, and thats very valuable.
Q: Content – Diller, Semel, AOL mentioned content, and content created by professionals, as integral to their businesses. Google involved the same way?
A: We fundamentally believe in sending content to other sites. We’re not creating content in the same way. E.g. first financial search result on Google is Yahoo Finance. Not trying to keep content on Google, trying to send them off.
Audience questions:
Q: Do you see a place for a web-based Office suite, is that something Google would be involved in?
A: I don’t really think that porting previous technology directly always makes sense. And I’m not saying that’s what Office is… (audience laughter) All the technology we have today – Web 2.0 – allow us to do better things, more. We don’t have any particular plans – we’ll do some things, others will do their thing – and eventually documents will become easier to use than they are today.
Q: We heard that clickfraud is not a problem from a senior Google employee? Is clickfraud a problem?
A: Sorry to disappoint but I’ll echo the problem – it’s something we have to work on but there’s already a long list of protections. We have fraud teams, a lot of our advertisers (in fact most) care about the conversions, making the sales, and know the exact ROI they’re getting. To them, if there’s a case of click fraud, it’s the same as disinterested clicks – don’t care as much about that, but about the ROI. (Yours truly: huh?) Doesn’t completely protect people but on the whole clickfraud is kept to a very low level.
Q: What areas are you focusing on?
John Battelle: What areas are safe to invest in?
A: We have several kinds of projects. Core strategic ones decided by the executive team, but many of our core successes have nothing to do with what our execs think are good ideas. Embarrassed to admit that, but some of our most successful Google projects come from outside top-level management. Makes it hard to predict what’s next?
John Battelle: What trickles up seems to be part of a portal? Might create the illusion that there is sort of a plan?
A: Well, sometimes I imagine our teams are dissatisfied with existing services…
Q: What’s Google’s vision for communications and user-generated content on the web?
A: We thought we’d try and impact something where people spend a lot of time – e-mail, for instance. I’m not the best person to predict what’s coming next? The reason why we try so many things out – on Labs and things that don’t even appear on Labs – is because we don’t really know what will work.
Q: From a personal level, where is video search going and where would you want it to go?
A: I think people underestimate the quality of the information that’s available in a video. I think if you take a Discovery channel sort of special or a Nova show, they have extraordinarily high-quality content. Format – happens to be video, and so much effort went into that. Making it searchable will really unlock it, allow you to find stuff about ‘Subject X’. We’ll become much better educated.
