Excerpts: Inside Larry & Sergey's Brain

Introduction: 1. The World's Librarians

"Good luck. I've been trying to do that for some years." -- Google CEO Eric Schmidt after being told the title of this book.

The world's first great library was the Great Library of Alexandria. It was created by Ptolemy I, a childhood friend of Alexander the Great and a general in his army. Ptolemy inherited rule of Egypt--which the army had conquered--after Alexander's death in 323 B.C. Ptolemy made the small, backwater town at the mouth of the Nile, named after the great conqueror, his new capital. By creating the library, somewhere around 300 B.C., he turned his city into a thriving center of intellectial thought envied by the world. It reigned as the greatest library in the world for three hundred yeats.

Ptolemy's goal was to collect all the written works in the world and put them in one place. By the time the library was destroyed, it was said to contain more than five hundred thousand papyrus scrolls, collected over 300 years. The library played a critical role in the Hellenistic Age, the period during which Greek culture spread into much of civilized Europe, Africa and Asia. Probably no other library had had such influence on cultures and knowledge--until the great library of the Internet was created more than two thousand years later.

The Internet's librarians sit today in a tidy campuslike business complex in Mountain View, California, the epicenter of Silicon Valley. It's a campus of modern steel, concrete and glass structures interlaced with trees, gardens, walkways and artificial ponds and streams, where people travel by bicycle, by scooter, and foot among--or inside--the buildings. These librarians are a universe away from the gray-haired ladies with glasses dangling from chains around their necks and an incredible knowledge of the Dewey Decimal system of many childhood memories. This is, after all, the electronics age.

Google Inc., a thriving corporation teeming with youthful and smart computer scientists and an incredible knowledge of the Internet, has become the defacto head librarian of the world's information; the entity that guides us through the labyrinthine web of online information, philosophy, entertainment, opinion, debate, slander, pornography, art, and worthless blather that the geeks and executives of the Internet like to lump into the single category of "content."

Larry Page and Sergey Brin did not create the Internet (although they now employ one of its key architects, Vint Cerf.) But if anybody embodies the soul of the world's head librarian, it's the brainy pair of Larry and Sergey. They created the heart of Google's philosophy, its business tactics, and the ethos behind all major issues--from censorship to user privacy to entering new markets and trying to change the business tactics of existing corporations.