My Yahoo!All Eyes on Google
With luck and brains, the search service has won the hearts and minds of millions and built a booming business. Watch out: Microsoft wants in.
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.
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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 (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) is taking aim. So is the biggest search outfit, Overture (nasdaq: OVER - news - people ), 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 (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), 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 (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ), then chief executive of Novell (nasdaq: NOVL - news - people ), 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.
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No Rest for the Query
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