Just when high tech had nothing left to believe in, along came Google.

As a skeleton key for the Internet, Google in five years has grown from an academic exercise in search of better ways of finding stuff on the Web into a thriving, prodigious advertising business beloved by users, sought by a hundred thousand advertisers, coveted by Wall Street and envied--or reviled--by a swarm of rivals.

 

5,707 years

How long it would take to do a manual search of Google's 3 billion Web pages, at one minute a page.

0.5 seconds

How long it usually takes Google to search its database.

$1,948,000,000

Market capitalization of publicly held search companies Overture, LookSmart, InfoSpace, FindWhat and Ask Jeeves.

$2,100,000,000

Market cap of Google, if it traded at 3 times estimated 2003 revenues.

88

Number of languages in which you can have the Google home page set up, including Urdu, Latin and Klingon.

33%

Google's share of global English-language searches.

Google was launched less than four years ago by two graduate students in computer science: one, a Russian émigré named Sergey Brin, now 29; the other, a Michigan-reared engineer named Larry E. Page, now all of 30. As a gateway to 3 billion Web pages, Google is a strangely unadorned site: 37 words, four tabs and a blank space where you type in a query of up to 10 words. Google's over 10,000 networked Google computers crawl through an index to those 3 billion pages, rank them with an equation that includes 500 million variables and spit out up to a few thousand listings. The ranking takes 500 milliseconds; the computers can handle a peak rate equal to 7 million queries per hour.

But Google has become much more than merely a search service. It is a daily tool and main entry point for millions of users, stealing the spotlight from the browser (Explorer or whatever) and Internet portals like Yahoo. It is a labor of love for programmers, who have built applications off of Google and posted them like trophies on the Web. One does a "smackdown," comparing the Internet ubiquity of two words ("love" beats "money," but not by much); another creates poems (see slideshow).

For Wall Street and Silicon Valley, Google is the great bright hope for an initial public offering that might revive moribund tech stocks. And Google has become its own meme, the stuff of New Yorker cartoons and a brand, like Kleenex and Band-Aid, that is in danger of becoming a part of the English language. You don't search for something on the Web anymore. You Google it.

Google now can be queried in 36 languages, with more to come. At the posh Hotel Bel Air, in Los Angeles, manager Lisa Hagen makes a point of Googling all guests before arrival, searching out better ways to spoil them. "If we find out they like to jog early in the day, we make sure they get a room with morning sun," she says. In Boston, Mark Kini manages a small limousine service that spends 80% of its ad budget on Google and other search sites. Says he: "It's how we survive the recession." In Westport, Conn. consultant Elena Amboyan's kids use Google daily; even when they research something at the library, they say they're Googling it.

It is all much more than Brin and Page ever had in mind when they started. "Sure, I'm surprised by the success," says Brin, unassuming, rumpled and wiry, his sneakers scuffing the upholstery of a conference-room chair. Users love Google, he says, because they find things there when they are desperate to know an answer. Keep offering better results and you hold their loyalty forever--and sell them stuff. Page adds that Google has become "like a person to them, helping them and giving them intelligence any hour of the day."

The passion and success igniting Google, and its emergence as a new interface for the Internet, have made it a rich, fat target for rivals. Yahoo (NasdaqNM:YHOO -) is taking aim. So is the biggest search outfit, Overture (NasdaqNM:OVER -), a little-known billion-dollar vendor that provides unbranded search services for other Web sites and has sued Google, alleging patent infringement. A gaggle of some 200 Web sites in China is reportedly going after Google, too.

And now Google faces the most lethal threat of all: Microsoft (NasdaqNM:MSFT), aroused, is taking aim at the popular site. This bears an eerie resemblance to the rise--and calamitous fall--of Netscape, the first commercially successful Web browser.

Will Google be the next victim of a Windows that swallows everything? To help ensure a future, Brin and Page brought in a grown-up as chief executive, Valley veteran Eric Schmidt, 48. Fittingly, Schmidt had abundant experience struggling against Microsoft in his two previous jobs: He was chief technology officer at Sun Microsystems (NasdaqNM:SUNW -), then chief executive of Novell (NasdaqNM:NOVL), two companies that thought, wrongly, they had Microsoft licked. Google's founders credit Schmidt with successfully managing their company's most intense period of growth.

To survive and succeed will require lots of talent, lots of acquisitions and lots more money. More important, Google will need to quell the hubris that is much in abundance at the jubilant company these days. To be at Google is to bask in your own public relations. The hallways of the company's four buildings in Mountain View, Calif. are decorated with articles from around the world praising the company. One current job posting includes duties as Google's company historian. Over 70 of the 800 employees have Ph.D.s. Google's head of engineering admits his big-brained staff is in awe of itself; he hopes the simplicity of the Google page masks that from the outside world.

In some ways Google feels like the giddy dot-coms of the stock-market bubble, circa 1999. Informal to a fault, Google offices are littered with party-colored lava lamps, bins of free Coke and candy and giant plastic balls that invoke Google's multicolored logo. The cafeteria serves free lunch to the workaholic ranks (and dinners, too; there's lots of code to write). When pizza gets delivered at one o'clock in the morning, plenty of people are on hand to devour it. Every day a thousand more résumés arrive from people hoping to join this work party.

But the dot-com parallels end when you look at the finances. The dot-bombs burned through tons of other people's money. Google makes a pile of cash on its own. After it went live in September 1999--six months before the Internet bubble finally popped--Google took in perhaps $25 million in 2000. Then it leaped fourfold to approach $100 million in 2001 and tripled to $300 million last year. Its gross could more than double this year to $700 million, estimates Safa Rashtchy of U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray.

Google, privately held--and determinedly so, for now--won't talk numbers, but it does brag that it just logged its ninth consecutive profitable quarter.Its revenue flows include ads (the bulk); search services for Yahoo, America Online and other sites (perhaps $100 million there); and custom-tailored, bright yellow servers for corporate accounts.

"Cheesy as it may sound," says cofounder Brin about the company's early days, "we never thought in terms of revenue streams." Now he must, for the next year or two could determine whether Google delivers on the high hopes it inspires in so many quarters or instead falters, glorying in its early success while others plot its doom.

Google traces back to 1995, when Sergey Brin and Larry Page, whose fathers taught college math, met at Stanford. The sons saw search as an interesting problem in organizing very large datasets.

At the time, users typed in a few words and got a list of thousands of Web sites using those words, but most of the results were irrelevant. Brin and Page quelled users' frustrations by adding order to this randomness. They judged a listed site's prominence by how many other Web sites valued it enough to have links to it. They gave sites a resulting "Page rank" (for Larry, not Web pages). This cliquey if democratic approach was later augmented by other algorithms that weight sites by other variables--news sites get a higher ranking than a 16-year-old's personal Web log.

The two grad students soon found their results were a step above any other kind of search. They had dubbed this system Back Rub, after the "back links" that pointed to a site. They adopted the name Google in early 1997, in a tribute to scale, a play on the number known as a googol--a one followed by a hundred zeros. The universe does not contain a googol atoms. The denizens of the company headquarters breezily refer to it as the Googleplex, that being the word for the unimaginably large number defined as a one followed by a googol of zeros.

Brin and Page introduced Google to the world in a paper they presented at the World Wide Web Conference in April 1998. Naively, they were downright hostile to advertising, calling it "insidious … because it is not clear who ‘deserves' to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed." A few hundred million in revenues later, Brin has changed his mind. On a Google results page, he says, "There are eight spots for ads and ten search results. It's a lot of room for diversity."

Soon after, the pair began trying to sell their technology to Web sites, including Infoseek, Excite and Yahoo. They found no takers; one chief executive told them that if his site could search only 80% as well as everyone else's, that was okay by him. "That company is now out of business," Page says. Then their faculty adviser invited them to a breakfast with Sun Microsystems cofounder Andreas Bechtolsheim on the Stanford campus. Midway through the demo, Bechtolsheim stopped them and wrote a check for $100,000 to Google Inc.

This presented a problem, as Google didn't yet have a bank account. There wasn't even a "Google Inc."--they hadn't yet decided to form a company. The check sat in a drawer for several weeks, and then they got serious.

By June 1999 Google had raised almost $30 million from venture firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, plus Stanford and individual investors. Three months later the Google site officially blasted off. It could scan 30 million Web pages. Today it culls 100 times as many, and still taps only half the Internet; the rest lies behind corporate firewalls or in isolated islands unlinked to anything else.

As Google began to thrive, the Web world was crashing, and this, too, proved lucky for the pair of founders. As dot-coms collapsed, Google took over cheap office space, barely used Aeron chairs, dozens of servers and platoons of out-of-work programmers. By mid-2001 Google was profitable, employed several hundred people and was seeing traffic grow 20% every month. Thriving despite the surrounding downturn, Google went shopping for a seasoned chief executive. "My job was to impose a little order," Schmidt says now. "I made it clear that I wasn't coming in to get rid of the founders." Sergey Brin gave up his chairman mantle and assumed the title of president of technology; Page, who had been chief executive, is product president.

While the two techies concentrated on improving their search formulas, Schmidt focused more on building a better business model. Google had run ads with its search results for a while, but on a fixed-fee basis. Its main rival, Overture, publicly held and with $668 million in sales last year (it projects $1 billion in revenues this year), had already gone a step further. It exacted higher fees from advertisers by selling them rights to given keywords so their ads pop up first when those words are entered in a query. Sponsors paid on a cost-per-click basis instead of the usual cost-per-thousand-visitors.

At one point in 2001, Google officials even met with Overture to compare notes, Overture officials say. In December 2001 Google started a similar test on its Usenet section, unveiling a service called Adwords. The response was so enthusiastic that, by February 2002, Adwords had been extended to all Google listings. It grew to 100,000 bidders in ten months, and thousands more advertisers are still signing up. Total Web advertising fell about 5% last year, to $6.5 billion, while search ads almost tripled to $1.4 billion and could hit $7 billion in five years, says Piper Jaffray's Rashtchy. (Google itself advertises very little, instead relying on word of mouth.)

"Some companies have purchased thousands of keywords, and they use them to test multiple products against multiple words," says Sheryl Sandberg, director of the wildly successful Adwords program. Noting most all Adwords bidders are U.S.-based, while half of Google searches are by users overseas, Sandberg sees huge growth in foreign markets. "The monetization should follow. This is a global bid," she says. Ads are sold in 11 languages.

Schmidt calls the success of Adwords "a total accident--when we went off fixed pricing, my only directive was ‘Just don't let revenues drop.'" His foes at Overture allege instead patent infringement, suing Google in April of last year; one month later America Online (NYSE:AOL) dropped Overture in favor of Google Adwords. The case is likely to drag on for a long time.

In Adwords, businesses use an auction system on the Google site to bid for the most popularly searched words and phrases. Google gets paid every time someone clicks on the ad itself. Bids start at 5 cents per click but can go to $15 or more for high-end products like helicopter parts. Critically, Google demotes a sponsor to a lower rung on its page if its response rate is too low, elevating a rival's ad for getting more clicks. This imposes a built-in pressure on businesses. They're even asked to revamp wording if less than 0.5% of viewers click on their ads. By contrast, many traditional banner ads get click rates of just 0.3%.

This could transform the $193 billion business of direct marketing. Junk mailers constantly work on narrowing the recipient list to the people most likely to respond and on jazzing up the envelopes to trick them into looking inside. Google ends the guesswork. People directly declare what interests them, and Google feeds them an appropriate ad. The ad's few pitch words are critical. For big corporate accounts like Dow Chemical, Google account executives continually recraft the message, like a haiku of commerce, aiming to maximize the click-through.

Google's long-term dream is to index all of the world's public information and make it searchable--everything from driver records to radio shows and films--and reap profits from it. This is scarier than it sounds. Google holds an archive of 800 million postings to Internet newsgroups, from alt.sex.bondage to alt.humanities.classics, most of which it bought on the cheap just before Dejanews.com went out of business in 2000.

It is a strange bazaar of information and a repository of embarrassment for people who were forthright (or shortsighted) enough to forgo anonymity in their postings. Google easily unearths the Web's first mention of Microsoft; and Sergey Brin's 1992 complaint about selling his car; and the musings of a married midwestern academic who posted a plea on alt.sex.fetish.tickling. Ours for the ages, unless he follows Google's somewhat obscure directions--located in the "Groups Help" section--on removing work from the archive. Even posts like that one trigger a precision-targeted ad: One offers "Discount 14-K Gold Anklets." Like much of the Web, Google also makes good money on porn.

While Google wants to own the world, Microsoft is going after Google. It now has 70 engineers working on search technology, and by some accounts it could triple that staff. Its new best friend is Overture, which already provides search services for Microsoft's MSN online service. Overture scientists frequently visit Microsoft in Redmond to plan next-generation features. Microsoft also could acquire a search company this year; one likely candidate would be San Francisco-based Looksmart (NasdaqNM:LOOK - ). Neither Overture, with a market capitalization of $669 million, nor Looksmart, at $328 million, would be more than a bagatelle for Microsoft, which has $38 billion in cash.

The Google guys profess to be unfazed. They have assiduously avoided the sins of Netscape, which belligerently jeered at Microsoft's efforts to build a Web browser. "Netscape mooned the giant," says one Google exec, noting Google welcomes Microsoft ads on its site. Plenty of other threats abound. Yahoo, despite investing in Google and paying for its service, in December paid $235 million in cash to acquire faded search firm Inktomi. Overture recently spent $177 million for the Web-search assets of Fast Search & Transfer and AltaVista, while Ask Jeeves (2002 revenues $74 million, net loss of $15 million) put up $3.8 million for Teoma. Even Google's engineers admit Fast and Teoma deliver results comparable to theirs.

Google has bought some prizes of its own, including personalization technology that "learns" what you are interested in based on previous searches; and a company called Blogger, which helps people set up their own Web-based diaries, or Web logs. More "blogs" mean more content, yielding more pages on which to run ads and more links to other pages. The more links, the better Google's results. Most recently Google scored a company called Applied Semantics, whose content-scanning techniques can be used to tailor ads not just based on the words a user searches, but also on the actual pages he reads on the Internet. That buy was a double score for Google--Applied Semantics had been selling those services to Overture. In the week following the purchase, Overture's shares fell about 30%.

The need to acquire more tech could add to the pressure for Google to go public, so it could use its stock as currency. Both Brin and Page are daunted by the prospect of baring Google's secret financials and losing focus in the drive to boost profits every quarter. "I fear we'll grow shortsighted and lose the wider potential applications of our company," says Brin. "The biggest thing we'd lose is the opportunity cost of what we could do if we didn't go public."

But Google's growing ranks want it, Wall Street bankers yearn for it and clues hint that all of them will get it. In the overcrowded office of Sheryl Sandberg, the 33-year-old Adwords chief, sits a crimson lava lamp given to her by investment bankers at Morgan Stanley. Very hip, very Google-geist. The former U.S. Treasury official says with a laugh, "They have high hopes for us."

Downstairs, past a Google grand piano and a few big plastic balls, Chief Executive Schmidt convenes a meeting of two dozen managers for a project they refer to as "Keeping Eric Out of Jail." They are altering Google's billing and accounting systems to comply with the new Sarbanes-Oxley Act--a law that applies to all public companies but no private ones. It may take until October to comply, but Schmidt's urgency is palpable.

Every Friday he holds a companywide meeting, preaching to a cocky flock. Along with Brin and Page he talks business, technology--and attitude. He reminds these whiz kids to count on nothing. Remember the Netscapes, he exhorts, the high-tech stars that gained fans, made paper millionaires of the early staff and then burned up in the heat of competition. Just about everybody, save Google's massing rivals, hopes they're listening.