dark eyes that often remain fixed on the floor, and wearing a dark T-shirt and jeans, he seemed strange to Karmazin, as he does to many who meet him for the first time. He was stonily silent. Sitting next to Page was Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whose shirt and tie, frameless glasses, and relatively old age—he was then forty-eight-were more welcoming. “Eric looked like me,” said Karmazin. Google’s cofounder, Sergey Brin, born the same year as Page, arrived late and out of breath in a T-shirt, gym shorts, and on Rollerblades.
Karmazin began the meeting with what he thought was a joke: “Don’t worry, guys, I’m not here to buy you!” Over the next several hours, the three computer scientists and the mogul sat in mismatched chairs on a tan and soiled shaggy carpet, discussing their respective businesses. Schmidt and Brin did most of the talking, and they spent as much time speaking of Google’s culture—engineers who always worked in teams and were given a sense of freedom, three free and healthy meals a day, free massages, hair-cuts, and medical attention—as about technology.
As they adjourned for lunch, Karmazin, walking past offices crowded with engineers and dodging colored physio balls used for stretching or as chairs for staff meetings, saw the evidence. Lunch was served in the employee cafe—six white Formica tables surrounded by metal folding chairs—where free buffet meals were dispensed daily by Charlie Ayers, whom the Google founders proudly introduced as the former chef for the Grateful Dead. To Karmazin, a corporate belt-tightener who had endeared himself to Wall Street by selling the Picassos off the walls of CBS headquarters, the perks seemed extravagant. Google’s corporate mission statement proclaims an aim “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It quickly became apparent that Sergey Brin and Larry Page saw themselves as missionaries. Karmazin’s only corporate mission is to make money.
Schmidt and Brin explained that Google was a digital Switzerland, a “neutral” search engine that favored no content company and no advertisers. Their search results were “objective,” based on secret algorithms, and no one could bribe his way to the top of a search. They explained how search worked. The speed of each search—now averaging about a half second to answer each query—relied on an elaborate infrastructure. Google in 2002 had scanned or indexed 3.1 billion Web pages, about 80 percent of what was then the World Wide Web. (By early 2009, there were an estimated 25.2 billion Web pages.) These pages were stored in a giant database and indexed by subject. Google software distributed each query among many hundreds of thousands of PCs and servers that are stacked in data centers and which work in tandem, simultaneously collecting different document links. The search is accelerated because Google stores on its servers three copies of its previous searches. Thus, Google does not have to scan the entire Web each time the same question is asked.
When a question is typed into the Google search box, the task is to divine the searcher’s intention: when you wrote “Jobs” in the query box, did you mean employment or Steve Jobs? The query may produce thousands of links, but the promise of Google—what Google considers its secret sauce—is that the ones that appear near the top of the search results will be more relevant to you. The company’s algorithms not only rank those links that generate the most traffic, and therefore are presumed to be more reliable, they also assign a slightly higher qualitative ranking to more reliable sources—like, for instance, a New York Times story. By mapping how many people click on a link, or found it interesting enough to link to, Google determines whether the link is “relevant” and assigns it a value. This quantified value is known as PageRank, after Larry Page.
All this was interesting enough, but where the Google executives really got Karmazin’s attention was when they described the company’s advertising business, which accounted for almost all its revenues. Google offered to advertisers a program called AdWords, which allowed potential advertisers to bid to place small text ads next to the results for key search words. Nike and Adidas might, for example, vie for ad space adjacent to keywords such as sneakers or basketball. All auctions for ads are run online, through an automated system. The highest bidder gets to place a small text ad appearing at the top of a gray box to the right of the search results; up to ten lower bidders win