Sergey Brin referred as “Enlightenment Man” by The Economist magazine. He is co-founder of Google Inc. the worlds largest internet company based on search engine and online advertising technology. He is ranked by Forbes as the 32nd richest person in the world.
Here are some of his quotes:
As we go forward, I hope we’re going to continue to use technology to make really big differences in how people live and work.
Obviously everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as being very innovative, very trusted and ethical and ultimately making a big difference in the world.
We believed we could build a better search. We had a simple idea, that not all pages are created equal. Some are more important.
To me, this is about preserving history and making it available to everyone.
We just want to have great people working for us.
Its clear there’s a lot of room for improvement, there’s no inherent ceiling we’re hitting up on.
I didn’t think I would come to this conclusion — but eventually I came to the conclusion that more information is better, even if it is not as full as we would like to see.
We will intensify our efforts to build out our infrastructure overseas and to develop products that are tailored to individual markets.
We are currently not planning on conquering the world.
As for “Don’t be evil,” we have tried to define precisely what it means to be a force for good-always do the right, ethical thing. Ultimately, “Don’t be evil” seems the easiest way to summarize it.
We deal with all varieties of information. Somebody’s always upset no matter what we do. We have to make a decision; otherwise there’s a never-ending debate. Some issues are crystal clear. When they’re less clear and opinions differ, sometimes we have to break a tie. We don’t try to put our sense of ethics into the search results, but we do when it comes to advertising.
We collect input. I think we do a good job of deciding. As I said, we believe that “Don’t be evil” is only half of it. There’s a “Be good” rule also.
Another social good is simply providing a free and powerful communication service to everyone in the world. A schoolchild in Cambodia can have a Gmail account. This one has one gigabyte of storage-200 times more.
Before Google, I don’t think people put much effort into the ordering of results. You might get a couple thousand results for a query. We saw that a thousand results weren’t necessarily as useful as 10 good ones. We developed a system that determines the best and most useful websites. We also understood that the problem of finding useful information was expanding as the web expanded.
We had to solve several problems. One was relevance: How do we determine if a web page relates to what you ask? Next, although many results may be relevant, which are the most relevant and the most useful? That’s something we continue to work hard on. Another important consideration is that the kinds of questions people ask have changed. They have become far more challenging and complex. People’s expectations have grown. They ask for unusual things that have a variety of associated linguistic challenges. We have to deal with all of those situations.
We have to consider many other challenges. How do you deal with different words that refer to the same concept? How do you help people find websites in languages they understand? Can we translate pages for them? Google is all about getting the right information to people quickly, easily, cheaply-and for free. We serve the world-all countries, at least 100 different languages. It’s a powerful service that most people probably couldn’t have dreamed of 20 years ago. It’s available to the rich, the poor, street children in Cambodia, stock traders on Wall Street-basically everybody. It’s very democratic.
One thing that’s important to us is the distinction between advertising and pure search results. We make it clear when something is paid for. Our advertising is off to the side and in a couple of slots across the top. Ads are clearly marked. There’s a clear, large wall between the objective search results and the ads, which have commercial influence. Other search engines don’t necessarily distinguish. Beyond ads, with other search engines, payment affects the results. We think that’s a slippery slope. At Google, the search results cannot be bought or paid for.
I agree that diversity of sources is a desirable goal, and in fact the results naturally tend to be diverse. We do some simple things to increase the diversity. If you check almost any topic, you will get diverging viewpoints. Everyone on any side of an issue will typically complain, though. Environmentalists will say, “Why aren’t you showing our results first?” An industrial group will say, “Why aren’t you showing our results first?” They all want to be number one. We think it’s good for us to encourage diverse viewpoints, and the search engine presents them. It happens naturally as a response to queries.
Sometimes the “Don’t be evil” policy leads to many discussions about what exactly is evil. One thing we know is that people can make better decisions with better information. Google is a useful tool in people’s lives. There are extreme cases, we’re told, when Google has saved people’s lives.
When people look up information in a life-threatening situation. Someone wrote that he was having chest pains and wasn’t sure of the cause. He did a Google search, decided he was having a heart attack and called the hospital. He survived and wrote to us. To help in situations like that, Google has to be quick and correct. Other people have written us with similar stories. We get postcards and pictures of them with their family. Those are extremes, but there are countless other examples. People are helped with their careers. Students are helped when they study. It’s a powerful tool.
You want access to as much as possible so you can discern what is most relevant and correct. The solution isn’t to limit the information you receive. Ultimately you want to have the entire world’s knowledge connected directly to your mind.
Your mind is tremendously efficient at weighing an enormous amount of information. We want to make smarter search engines that do a lot of the work for us. The smarter we can make the search engine, the better. Where will it lead? Who knows? But it’s credible to imagine a leap as great as that from hunting through library stacks to a Google session, when we leap from today’s search engines to having the entirety of the world’s information as just one of our thoughts.
Google actually relies on our users to help with our marketing. We have a very high percentage of our users who often tell others about our search engine.
Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.
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