In Search Of The Real Google

Sunday, Feb. 12, 2006 By ADI IGNATIUS
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To gauge Google's ability to weather the storms, TIME spent several days at the company's headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. It's a unique experience. Set up in 1998 in a Silicon Valley garage (O.K., that part's familiar), Google inflated with the Internet bubble and then, after everything around it collapsed, kept on inflating. Google's search engine—devised by Brin and Page when they were Ph.D. candidates at Stanford—was better than the rest and, without any marketing, spread by word of mouth from early adopters to, eventually, your grandmother. Search became Google; google became a verb. The world fell in love with the fun, effective, blindingly fast technology and its boy-wizard founders. Ultimately, the company even found a business model—advertising—and last year made a profit of nearly $1.5 billion on revenue of $6.1 billion.

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Beyond that quantifiable success, Google has tried to be special, the company that won't give in to the dark side, be it censorship, greed or just plain jerkiness. It's hard to say exactly what "Don't be evil" means, and one could argue that that's the unwritten principle of every respectable corporation. But Brin and Page's ultimate vision—to make nearly all information accessible to everyone all the time—is a tricky thing, given that a lot of us (individuals, corporations, governments) aren't comfortable with a 100% free flow of data. Just last week Google was slammed for a software feature that results in the company's storing users' personal data for up to a month. At times like these, Google keeps that mantra handy—Don't be evil, don't be evil, don't be evil—as a reminder to try to do the right thing in a complex world. Which means turning down $80 million windfalls from time to time. Or telling U.S. prosecutors, as Google did last month, that it won't hand over data on people's Internet use.

That's why Google's decision to launch a censored website in China was so jarring. (See "Google Under the Gun," TIME, Feb. 13, 2006.) Doing a totalitarian government's bidding in blocking the truth in order to make a few extra bucks is practically the definition of evil. Google acknowledges that it's in a tough situation but says it ultimately has to obey local laws. "There's a subtext to 'Don't be evil,' and that is 'Don't be illegal,'" says Vint Cerf, an Internet founding father who now serves as "chief Internet evangelist" at Google. "Overall, having Google there is better than not having Google there." But at what cost? Can Brin and Page live with the idea that Chinese Netizens can't access anything other than the official line on, say, the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and that Google is part of the cover-up?

There's another big question that makes Brin and Page squirm: Does Google have a master plan? To outsiders, it sometimes seems as if the company is investing everywhere, trying to be everything, often giving its products away. A few of the newer pursuits: a proposal to provide free wireless Internet service for San Francisco; an online video store selling TV shows and NBA games; a classified-advertising site; a project to scan every book ever published and make the texts searchable; a free desktop package loaded with software; free instant messaging and online voice communication; a $1 billion investment in America Online. (AOL, like this magazine, is owned by Time Warner.) In the past year or so, Google Inc. has doubled in size to about 6,000 employees to handle all the new work. Even the bullish Rashtchy acknowledges that "Google is a black box for most people."

So what's the plan? World domination? Keep throwing money at everything and see what works? Google isn't making friends along the way, taking on the likes of Microsoft (desktop software), eBay (classified advertising), phone companies (the San Francisco wi-fi plan) and others. Google keeps a confidential list of the 100—yes, 100—top priorities under development. That's a long list, and investors would love to know more about it and what Page, Brin and Schmidt are thinking. But secrecy is part of the culture. Google doesn't even invite analysts in for earnings-guidance sessions, so the resulting surprises can lead to big share-price swings like the recent drop. "We don't generally talk about our strategy ... because it's strategic," says Page. "I would rather have people think we're confused than let our competitors know what we're going to do."