Google and the Mission to Map Meaning and Make Money

This book is the unfolding story of the new technology of Internet Search - how Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, discovered a new way to index the Internet's network of networks by developing Search methods so powerful that they effectively created a free, public and universal library out of billions of random documents. It also tells how, together with the help of a brilliant team built initially at Stanford University, they then found a new way of making money through contextual advertising - now worth $e billion, leaving potential competitors, particularly Microsoft, far behind. It shows how Google's founders have also succeeded in insisting that integrity, rather than profit, remains at the heart of an enterprise that they will continue to control, despite the best efforts of Wall Street. The second half of this book also seeks to explain the central problems of machine intelligence - the difference between words and their meaning, or syntax and semantics - which had blocked this kind of IT development for half a century until Google's founders discovered that hypertext, the unique feature of the Internet that links documents, could be measured and mapped to sort millions of apparently similar pages for relevance and significance. Google's pursuit of a hugely ambitious and optimistic American dream that leaves them globally admired, and respected - keeping their principles intact whilst also creating a fabulously wealthy company - is a winning blend of luck, jokes, mathematical inspiration, engineering perspiration, deep technical knowledge of the Internet and, they would have you believe, thousands of highly-trained pigeons. The book is 288 pages long, including a comprehensive index and 600 item bibliography covering virtually all aspects of Internet Search. The print version of the book comes with a free online electronic version, with hypertext links to related articles and books - designed to make any aspect of the history of Internet search easy to find with a couple of mouse clicks. The book's author, Bart Milner, is a trained technology journalist and editor who started using the Web in 1984 (with a 300-baud acoustic coupler!) and then became a developer partly to try and solve the question of why computer logic has been unable to deal with meaning and association. This background has given him an insight into the inspired, but almost accidental, way that Google's founders cracked the problem of finding a significant document from billions of unindexed and changing Web pages in a fraction of a second. Anyone interested in the future of the Internet and Information Technology should enjoy this fast and fluid story of a company which has become a flagship business of the 21st century by not conceding any of its integrity and principles to the huge pressures of commercial profit, whilst providing some of the most elegant and powerful engineering solutions ever seen on the Net.

Wherefore by their fruits (and roots) ye shall know them...

It was 3.15 am Greenwich mean time, hour of the wolf, 30th April 2004 when an email newsfeed finally appeared on Google's Initial Public Offering (IPO), which would take the company into public sale on Wall Street. The Financial Times had posted 1 up links to the IPO filing to the SEC (Security and Exchange Commission) and Larry Page's users' manual 2. Sixty pages later, as dawn broke over London, it was clear that they had done their maths, and figured the engineering. They were safe and on their way. At about the same time, the spacecraft Cassini arrived at Saturn 3 , having used the gravity of Venus and Jupiter to power its slingshot 4 trajectory since its launch in 1997. Google's pilots: founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Eric Schmidt, are undertaking a similar manoeuvre in cyberspace; instead of being sucked into what sf writer William Gibson 5 has called "a black hole... the unthinkable gravitic tug of Big Money" they are using the force of their multi-billion dollar IPO to power the next stage of their jaw-dropping journey into hypertext, context and meaning.

Although Cassini's flight had looked almost flawless, in 2004 fingers were still crossed for the success of its European Space Agency probe Huygens, particularly after the Genesis probe crashed into the Utah desert at 193 mph in September, because the parachute switches were installed backwards. When they discovered that Huygens was using a different radio frequency from Cassini, NASA remedied it by remote engineering over a billion miles, but might not have wanted advice from the world's press at the time.

Wobbling around Venus

Google were not so fortunate in their own transit of Venus. When they failed to schedule the publication of an Interview with Playboy outside the SEC-designated 'quiet period', they found, as in the Irish joke, that the eyes of the Skibbereen Eagle and every other news channel on the planet were upon them.

They should have enforced a later publishing date, but the Playboy interview is an American rite-of-passage, a mainstream statement that shows the jocks from high school who really calls the shots. More seriously their July price estimate and volume had to be diverted sharply downward for the August IPO, which jumped 18% on the first day of trading, finally giving Wall Street the bonus it craved, unearned unless you count the work done on the barrage of negative publicity, fuelled by Google's own exaggerated errors, which helped scare off retail investors.

A new light

But it is probably fair to say that the Black Hole of an IPO did little more than rattle Google's insulation tiles, the real journey will now follow. After the first day of trading the Wall Street Journal's headline was "Google's Debut is Considered a Success". (Their second headline was: "Google's Wealth Could Bring Woes" - gee, thanks, guys.) The FT's Lex gave what the Trotskyists used to call 'Critical support in struggle':

Wall Street will see the auction as a failure. Execution was poor. Strong vested interests and tough markets made life even harder. However, Google did get listed and its unconventionality shone light on important areas. James Surowiecki of the New Yorker was even more forthright in an FT Comment article entitled Ignore Wall St's whining - Google's IPO worked:

Wall Street can spin this however it wants. But Google went public without the marketing support of a major investment bank, without handing out favours to well-connected executives and without dictating a price in the manner of Soviet central planners. Because it did, it now has hundreds of millions of dollars that it would not otherwise have had. By any standard, this was one IPO that worked.

No concessions

Money loves only money, and if Google ever runs out of cash, expect the banks to be gleeful to the point of sadism as they dispatch the management and, almost certainly, break up the company. But, same difference really, even if Google had, like previous dot.coms permitted Wall street to make obscene profits out of its IPO, it would still get the same treatment if it ever mismanages its income flow.

The founders' founding ideals of free, unbiased, fast, public Internet Search would then be repeated publicly, before being ignored behind closed corporate doors, because the short-term profits from Search bias are so big, particularly if, like Google, you have a huge brand based on honesty. That remains a threat. Yahoo! survived as a company following its IPO, true, but only after not only its founders had been replaced, but the "professional" management demanded by Wall Street had themselves been purged. That's not what Page and Brin intend to let happen, if they can fight to prevent it. So far so good.

This is partly a battle for America's soul; whether the country returns to the hugely ambitious, ingenious engineering, which has been its hallmark, or follows the Enron route to making money by gambling with its own, and other people's, primary assets. Having survived the dot.con boom, Google's management share with the whole IT industry the knowledge that financial speculation in tech shares has done nothing but damage to anybody except the tiny minority of individuals and companies who won the sweepstake of other peoples' investment.