Google Holds the Secret for Web Success
April 17 -- Google is one of those quirky dot-coms whose offices feature a piano in the lobby, video games, lava lamps and a pool table.
But there's one minor difference: 700 dot-com companies have gone out of business in the two years since Silicon Valley crashed — yet Google survived.
"We think we're going to be a huge, long-lasting company," says Larry Page, one of Google's co-founders. He's 29 and a year older than his partner, Sergey Brin.
"The people that were out there just to get rich quick, those have faded off," says Brin.
Google is an Internet "search engine," a Web site that searches other Web sites for information you want.
Let's say, for instance, you're looking up "cancer." That's a big subject, and in less than half a second, Google finds 11 million references, which most of us would find overwhelming. But then it lists them in order of their popularity with other Internet users.
That makes for a very efficient search, and apparently, people are telling their friends about it. Google says it has not done very much advertising, but the research firm Jupiter Media Matrix reports that in February — the most recent month for which figures are available — it was the sixth-most-visited site on the World Wide Web.
"Google processes about 150 million searches a day, and those searches come from all over the world," says Susan Wojcicki, the director of product management at Google.
The company's office has the trappings of other dot-coms, but analysts say Google wasn't run like a dot-com.
Profitable, to a Point
It makes money through advertising and by selling its technology to other Web sites. It bought computers on the cheap. It never bought Super Bowl ads. In short, it didn't spend a lot of money before it knew it could make money.
"We've been profitable on an operating basis for four quarters," says Eric Schmidt, the chairman and CEO of Google, "and we expect to be profitable this quarter and for the foreseeable future."
