Google Speaks: Secrets of the World's Greatest Billionaire Entrepreneurs, Sergey Brin and Larry Page

3.1. THE ULTIMATE SEARCH ENGINE

In 1996, Larry came up with the notion of using links between Web pages to rank their relative importance to searchers. The more links a website had, the more likely it was to contain the most useful information. The concept sounds simple; executing the idea was a little more complicated. Nevertheless, it didn't take long for Page's brainchild to dominate the world of Internet search.

People use Google more than 200 million times a day in more than 100 languages, from Kurdish to Klingon, and it does deliver the results in a flash. Google searches five billion Web pages for links in two-tenths of a second.

By early November 2008, Google's share of domestic Web searches grew to 71.7 percent, compared with 17.7 percent by its closest competitor, Yahoo!, and 5.4 percent by third-ranking Microsoft. Google also ruled the search business financially, claiming 76 percent of the 2008 market in terms of revenue.^[]

One of the reasons for Google's success is that people like the results. But adding to that, Google is ubiquitous. It is constantly before the eyes of most people using the Internet. Google has been able to provide search services for a large number of Internet operations, including America OnLine (AOL) and the free Web browser, Mozilla Firefox. In 2007, the Mozilla Foundation received $66 million, or 88 percent of its $75 million in revenues, from a partnership with Google.

Yet Larry and Sergey believe that Google still is in the early stages of ...