November 24, 2003

Google is one of Silicon Valley's most successful .com reality and one that is the most recognized. So now, how will it mature in the years to come?

It was the day before Sergey Brin's 30th birthday, and by all rights he should have been on top of the world. Here onstage in front of some 300 peers—engineers and other geeks attending a conference on Internet search—he was answering softball questions about Google, the search-engine company he co-founded five years ago.

Brin likes to do this, and who can blame him? Google is among the most successful Silicon Valley startups of all time, and wherever Brin goes these days, he gets treated like a celebrity. "How did Google become such an icon?" the moderator asked. And, "Will you acquire Microsoft?"

But this time Brin wasn't reveling in it; he responded more like a rock star being asked to play his greatest hit one ... more ... time. Asked about consolidation in the search business, he said, "I preferred things during the bubble"—when Google was not so famous—"and we could go on doing our own thing." At the end of his presentation he repeated the thought, saying that coping with Google's torrid growth had become the worst part of his job: "It's a distraction from pure technology, which is what I love."

When Google goes public, most likely by this spring, Brin will become a billionaire. Make that a multibillionaire. So to hear him pining for the good old days sounds strange—especially since, thanks in part to Google, the Internet has never been more useful or fun than it is right now.

Google's search service has changed the way everyone from CEOs to their teenagers look for and think about information, dominating search not just from its own site but also as the engine for major sites like Yahoo, AOL, and Amazon. Plus Google has triumphed in more than search; in the past two years it has astonished the online world by proving that Internet advertising really works. And in what may be the ultimate sign of success, Google has even become a verb, as in "I'm googling for the numbers now."

When the numbers pertain to Google, they look very, very good. In 18 months the company has quadrupled in size, now employing more than 1,300 people. Annualized revenues have sextupled, to about $900 million. Annualized pretax profits have grown by a factor of 23, to about $350 million, according to a handful of people who have been told the figures.

Only a few high-tech companies in history, like Apple, Compaq, Sun, and more recently Amazon.com, have generated that kind of revenue growth so fast. None has made as much money doing it—not even Netscape, which grew faster than Google has but made money in only one of its years.

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