>> a special weeknight edition of booktv. .. >> so i guess i will just say to begin with, you know, so it's about 15 years ago that a couple of grabsch students at stanford

set up shop in a dorm room and set something up today called page rank and one of them was named larry paige, upon intended i believe, and the story is now pretty much the stuff of legend, and they pretty much attended the portal business. they showed the world that searching was something important and they had a dream of making all the world's information accessible and they are continuing on that path and the past that you have laid out and in an incredibly well documented book has at times been a tough one, and gets tougher as the dreams sort of hit against some of the realities of the world. >> it's the company, not the book. [laughter] >> yeah. but the book is actually one of these things where i am so

interested it's always hard for me to tell for sure but if you were adel interested i'm sure you'd find a fascinating read and i learned things up the company. to you though, you have been covering the technology for a while. why did you pick google as the focus of your latest book? >> i first came across google when it was in history just starting to get noticed a around the world really has a much more effective way to find things on the internet. people fought searching was pure and as good as a was going to get and then google came along and it was something so good that it was missing and of strands formative. not only could you find when you wanted, but it opened up new frontiers so people could start his knowing they could be found, and i think -- when new things

start out i always want to know is this going to be something which is a nice development or something we're i have to know people behind the company, they are going to be making a difference in our lives, so i went down to the google-plex as it was then and i knew the public relations person. she was from apple computer and i said cindy, i want to meet these guys. it was october, 1999. and as it happens, it was google's celebration of halloween, and larry was dressed like a viking, he had a big fur vests and horns coming out of it and sergey was dressed like a

couch with utters coming out and the cowboy and the viking took me into a room. [laughter] there's something about them which was compelling and i felt as it grew to an important company and then had its ipo internet to be incredibly successful business i thought this could be worth of the book. there were a couple of books going and i thought i'm going to let it go and worked with something else. but i felt there's something about this company which was not only different and what it gave us the different in its own terms of its. it really hit home for me in the summer of 2007, and i was invited to go along with some young google managers. the credit program called assistant managers and they were the future leaders of google to be not only skilled in the

engineering sense but an entrepreneurial sense as well, and every summer maris the mayor, one of the key executives at google, takes these young leaders and managers to visit the google offices around the world and i was afraid to go on this trip and literally went around the world to tokyo, beijing, bangalore and tel aviv and i spent 24/7 with these people which was a sort of rare experience for a journalist. and in side of the company i realized it was much more interesting than i thought. it was not just all the things i said before, but a cultural movement going on that these people were steeped in the future in a way the predecessors in the business haven't been and i got a sense of what their values were in my leader learned that they were directly channeled from sergey bring and larry page, and i thought wouldn't it be amazing to tell the story of google as much as possible from the inside, to get

that experience i had with this group of 18 engineers for the company of 20,000 people as it was then. and that is what i was trying to do. >> i learned a couple things and we are going to get on to what you are selling in a minute but first, how long did it take you to actually do this and how much access were you actually getting to google in the process? >> i started the book as a pretty intense manner in june, 2008. so almost three years. and i asked for a lot of access. basically the most important thing what to talk to anyone i wanted to talk to and i wanted to sit in on a number of meetings and there are other things that go on their but mainly it was talking and

talking again. i wanted to talk to the people of google, not just larry e. and sergey and eric but people do never heard of were the key to google. there's a number of people as it turns out inside of google who were very important in developing this product. they were superstars but they were unknown to everyone else and influential in the company and sometimes they were just wonderfully strange and these were the people i wanted to spend time with and not just once but sometimes multiple times. and my -- the same month a started serious work on this book i begin full-time at wired magazine. i left "newsweek" and shifted to a wired, but as john mentioned, the ratings for a free lancer and it was just the inexperienced to spin off articles with google's permission for basically everything i did inside of google was for the book and

otherwise -- >> can i interrupt for a minute because didn't sergey say to you why don't you just released little chapters at the time? >> the google but search later on but it's the company that takes books very, very seriously as a corpus of information. but the founders aren't really book people, and in terms of their own preferences and when sergey set up that he said to another book writer i remembered reading and thought the same seriousness and sometimes working on a why your article he would spend a little more time with me. he never spent as much time as he did and newsweek and of course we would come to new york and have lunch or much more accessible he would come out with new products and would be sergey on the phone telling you about it. calling on an issue and they

would say sergey wants to get on the phone and in later years for about that, too. they were tougher guests, but -- >> well, they were bigger, they are busier, sure, right? >> but obviously, you know, in this mobile time at the google-plex. >> i thought that is funny what she said to you in the process of this. so a couple of years you were there a lot. they give you access to all kind of people. you didn't feel at all like they were really guarding access to you. it seems like the things you talked about in the book they do feel like you really are talking about things in a very factual way, moments, scary moments, that they really give you access. >> well, one thing mentioned before is i had access to a number of projects at google that were not public yet. so, and well in advance. this was something that didn't happen on the truck hit. during that trip one of the things they did is they went to every office and they would

explain to the engineers about the office. here's what we are of two and the engineers whether it was an bangalore or tokyo they would say here's what we are doing here. one of the things that the engineers melanie talked about is a product, this browser that they were working on and so they knew they could trust me to keep my mouth shut and not pre-announce products. but knowing about a lot of things that were going on at google that were not public open up a level of trust because people can talk about something which was in public i think they came to feel that they could unburden other things and i also like to give google a lot of credit when a lot of times i would be in an interview and there would be three occasions in the room more often than not it would look over the person out in the audience can we say

this? and she said go ahead and after a certain amount of time i was talking to eric wants and asked me how is it going before we went into our interview and i said it's funny. learning to play guitar at a certain point he stopped looking down where your fingers are on the court and just played the music. and that's the way that i felt a certain point when i was at google. i felt very much at home, and the people i think picked up on that when i interviewed them, and within a few minutes, we were talking, not so much with the distance of a journalist and a source, but almost as if in some sense we were collaborators or colleagues. >> my experience has largely been the they were relatively open as companies go especially compared to apple but that is such a different story. [laughter] >> you know, one of the things -- looks good to sort of where the book, some of the earlier parts of the book and one of the

things that you actually make it quite a point of saying is that both of these guys went to montessori schools and that actually understanding that is kind of the key to understanding this company in terms of how they think and we have interesting thoughts about the kind of freedom that the experience. >> i actually read the works to better understand them and was interesting because it talked about the balance of with the freedom of discipline and it mapped out of the perceived philosophy of larry and sergey and what employees should be able to do. it's a liberating thing not to have to answer to the authority and say what you do next the answer may be the famous 20%

project sat google. >> 20% of your time to work on something you were just excited about, right? >> sometimes people call it the 120% because they do all the work any way and then they get to be 20% of things but that seems very much in keeping with the montessori philosophy. for larry and sergey themselves, they perceive this within the structure of google and it's important for them to be free radicals inside of the systems don't want to be pinned down too much to the point where at one time they miss the assistance and had a group of young women who were the assistance, they were called ll say, larry sergey assistance people would talk to them and say if sergey could come to this and larry explained to me he didn't like the idea and that was it, from there on

how they were free to roam and go wherever you wanted and it has an interesting effect and the employees of have to find them >> it seems that there's that management that struck me the development of the core ideas behind google, their ability to as it were stay out of the box which is a cliche turn at this point, the ability to constantly ask why should it be that way? for example in advertising, the example of assets, on every level it seems these two guys at the core are saying why should it have to be that way? >> right, and the advertising system was the first product and really it is the signal product

of the internet age in terms of making money. there is no product on the internet as well as google, but it's even better than that because it is a product, and advertising product that people want to see. and how do we know they want to see it? google, being google, tests everyone and they found out they want to see it. they give a certain percentage palu do this regularly. they might still be doing it. sometimes you go to the google search engine landsea no adds. it's because you are part of the test. every time you use google come actually i found you are part of a test which blew my mind, right? we can talk about it a little later. but in this case people search more when there are ads, therefore they are happier than when the ads and the reason why they are so successful is that even though it's an option system, the highest bidder doesn't win. the bid is modulated by how useful the ad is and how much people so they build the add

quality into the system to make it useful to the advertiser and that is an ideal that they managed to meet that was a great triumph. >> it seems like in one point in the but you ought to talk about google as a sort of token where it's not just the advertiser and google. it's the person who was seeing the ads which in many ways this is kind of different from the way people thought about advertising before. so, google once the as to actually be useful and this was didn't settle the people in the traditional law advertising community? you have to measure it in order to know how good the odds are how useful they are and as a result the science in google's add a system is just as sophisticated as the science in the google search engine and

that's why they have so many statisticians and economists and mathematicians working on the site as well as the engineers and computer scientists and artificial and intelligence specialists working on the search. >> it's the death of a madman. the sort of mystery to it is my microphone working there? it is the sort of debt of mystery as you say in advertising because you can really know and they figured it out mathematically you can really know whether or not and and is useful to somebody. >> i have a lot of fun actually talking with some of the people on the site. usually we read an article about google you don't see anything about the sales people. but to me what is fascinating how the sales people of google and google still owes the sales people even though leary asked at one point why we have these people? [laughter] the change their role from sitting out over dinner negotiating something and

convincing a client to take an agency to take an ad out to almost being your diet to say how you buy these keywords and when you do and that changed when they moved away from paying for the ads how many people saw it to how many people click on that, and it was all taken care of, it was measurable and would change that will dramatically and some people in the ad department thought wow, where are we doing here when we are no longer sitting we are going to get this money we have a pretty good thing going. google is making some nice money before the switch to that system, but google took a deep breath and implemented the system and it turned out to be we more successful than anything we had seen before. >> is it general motors who for some of their people out at one point? i mean what's wrong with you

guys? >> people felt even before that just the idea of seeing these search adds, people thought this is ridiculous. this is advertising. this isn't the way that things work and google had a difficult time convincing people of buying keywords and show up in these blocks were appropriate advertising vehicles for a big corporation. but when they start to hurt deeply out, some huge number, 90% or something of people who buy the cargo online to research their purchase, and even general motors figured out this is something we should get involved in. >> so, these guys, they come in and are very unconventional. i think that this was a serious story they were talking about how to transactions in countries that didn't have credit cards and larry page said we could take votes and uzbeckistan. [laughter] very unconventional, and the people who founded google, the

vp, said we want a grown-up to come in and this is when eric schmidt comes in to the company and he for many years i guess about ten was the, quote on quote, growth in the company. how did they pick eric? >> as you mentioned, the venture capitalists put $25 million into google in 1999 with the expectation that these two young men from stanford with no experience in the company would get what is called adult supervision and hire experienced manager to be the ceo. >> because you dress like a cow. [laughter] >> there's some interesting videos about. but, a few months after they got

the money, they called and said we changed our mind. we think we can run this company ourselves. and john, his first instinct was to say i'm out of here but he held back and said we'd a minute. why don't you go and talk to a number of ceos, some of the companies that you respect. what i call the magical mystery tour, the best ceo's which were the sort of steve jobs and all the greatest. so they came back from the tour and they said you know, you are right. we like having a ceo and we know just the person who can be the ceo. steve jobs. [laughter] >> he was a little busy and i don't know if he was going to do that, but john finally got them to look at eric and there's a

number of reasons they respect him. he had technical jobs and had a program that they liked and iraq was also smart enough to know he couldn't go in and say i am of the adelstein going to run this thing, step aside and let me make the decisions. instead, he adopted preconscious it seemed to me stance at every point, and i heard this a lot, talking about how early and larry and sergey work. he would talk about how much he learned from larry and sergey and eric what do these things that google that helped to make it an effective corporation, but he yielded some of his autonomy. there was this troika system where on some important matters they voted and you could say that in certain respects larry and sergey were a lot in that

voting structure and he was successful slowing down some things that leary and sergey want to do right away for instance the browser we mentioned earlier the wanted to do it earlier concerned about microsoft and noticing how well google was doing he wouldn't want to moon the johnetta as jset and eric's history -- microsoft is it scary company. he didn't want to take them on. it hadn't ended too welford netscape so you slow that down but leary and sergey, a look ahead and they don't worry about who is in a space that they think is interesting for google to go. they just go. the divan. so it's an interesting dynamic that iraq was able to sometimes stayed off their impulses and and sometimes not. but sometimes the record be the

first to admit this he would say i fought we couldn't do that and i was wrong and as a member of things like going and abetting a lot of money to the aol business which was actually very important for google. >> yeah. well it seems like for many years he was able to navigate that, and perhaps in conflict and microsoft that may have been a wise decision. i wanted to ask about something in the book i did not know which is that google is one of the largest computer manufacturers in the world. this was fascinating to me. i had no idea and letting explain why i was like of course. and i'm thinking that may surprise people here as well. explain why it is that google is one of the largest computer makers in the world >> of the things i wanted to talk about the data centers of

google and that is one of the secrets and i was looking at a couple ways in learning about it and one was the were getting a little more opened when they used to be, not open enough to say come to the data center and explore, but as it turned out, doing an early story for "newsweek" i had gone to one of the google's the dissenters when they were releasing space and kuhl locations centers not far from here but there were some excellent police who were more robust but the data centers and then there were some publications that google had which were available that you could learn so you could piece together something their people talk about how many computers google house and how many servers. at a certain point they start telling you made 100,000 said okay you could say that. it was probably much more

knowing how much it is but a million is the baseline there. there's many, many -- >> i guess the question is why are they building their own? why do they build their own rather than go and buy them from the -- >> it's cheap. it's cheap is the reason it proceeding's success. when you talk about the money into the computers, cost is a big problem and the do interesting thing with those computers. other companies might think you know what, we are going to be not be penny wise, we are going to buy the equipment that doesn't break down it gets a little better and offer a system built for the failure it is easy

to deal when one of the servers goes down you can swap without really quickly. and they found out that in the long run that stands much better. in a way google is the most successful failure system that is ever invented. they have the redundancy of the software system and it is extremely innovative. it is really built to handle failure, very successful and you could argue that in the way that the rollout products some of that goes out, too. they built the handle failure and products. they figure if you're not feeling is it not of products are not trying hard enough >> it was five years, right? so we hadn't released it i guess. >> i think google single-handedly destroyed the term data. [laughter] >> i think it's sort of like spider-man and new york city be

previewed. >> talk about failure. [laughter] >> artificial intelligence is also -- i think as the company got bigger and move along the started to realize increasingly more and more the the had to be involved in artificial intelligence. and i would say in the but you mentioned something about how larry said we just like to install in everyone's brain but they haven't quite done that. >> every year google has these elaborate april fool's day and i even noticed how the fantasy over the top subjects are things that larry and sergey really want to make happen. the talk of these artificial intelligence that to this and that and inappropriate april fool's joke early in history and now they are building it. so, and you say increasing

reliance it was always there. i went back to some of my early interviews with larry and sergey and they were going on about the artificial intelligence very, very early in their histories. and as it turned out, as the search engine evolved, artificially intelligence learning became more and more a factor in that. everyone knows about page but when you see it google they were learned about in the earlier days the said well, the search engine is fantastic because it relies on the stockers the of the web. what people think is important, what is what google identifies as important for the search. and that was a huge breakthrough. and it helped google to rise above the top. but as the google search engine involved, it could do its power from learning to read it learns from the data people get it when it reacts to the search engines. so when you go to a search engine you choose a result or

maybe say this doesn't work and going to put in another term this is information google uses to find out if you are happy and google learns about the world from that. if you swap one word for another word in your search and query, and google thinks maybe those words are kind of similar. let me look. so google learn synonyms that way. and by the same process google learns languages by having the documents they use the translated the cuts from one to another they can learn by this and algorithms how language works and that is all google translates what works. so, more and more you can see how the artificial intelligence really is in trouble to what google does and i think there's a number of things you can say that google is an ex company or why company or a technology company. it's an internet company. it is and i think artificial intelligence company as well. >> i think in using it i see it more and for how much it continues to get this is where

they are going to start increasing and get in trouble which is how much information they have about people, and how they are using it. and i know -- and the sort of conflict it seems like between what they are trying to do, which is to really guess what you want before you know you want to read they are really trying hard -- >> there is a term called zero in query search at google. [laughter] >> that's a little frightening actually. [laughter] the culture of google have for a long time this experimental sense and still has it. so, in the years that you have been covering it, my question is as it has grown there are 24,000 people now? do you still feel that when you go there do you still feel some sense of like this is an experimental place where, you know, you can see a guy dressed as a cow?

>> we are sort of taken for granted now a lot of these things and meet the april fools is going to start as you can take it now. and there is an april fool's infrastructure. people work for months at these things. so, you can say it's clever, it's part of culture but it's not so spontaneous any more. and i think you could say a lot of things. these things become institutionalized and people get used to them. but it's still rather remarkable. you don't see it about the outside of the silicon valley a lot of the things they do at google. the things outside silicon valley twitter when you visited twitter and it's very early days they had a lot of the amenities that google has in the start up their is a good idea to feed your employees, they don't leave the campus during the day and they are happier and there may

be less likely to be resentful employees to use to make a lot of companies don't think that we but google always has. i want to actually switch though to, okay, culture of innovation. the thought youtube because they could not themselves -- the new video is going to be important to the web. the navy's all that coming that they couldn't -- when they start of the video they couldn't quite get on the formula and was all side of the company that happened. so, i guess a couple of things. one is you think that was a good acquisition? more to come and do you think it was a sign that the company was perhaps less innovative than it had been? >> i think it is definitely a sign that google is a bigger company and cannot operate as nimbly and freely as it could when it was small. and you can see that. naturally the youtube thing is a great example of that because as it turns out, there is an

amazing method by which you can compare the way that speech in video, google's product was developed and the way that youtube was developed because there was a lawsuit that came with viacom where all the e-mails of both sides cannot come in and you could see from the google site there were all of these e-mails basically with the managers of the google didier spent a lot of their time doing was preparing for the presentations to their bosses and talking to lawyers to make sure they were not going to do something to get in trouble or to be -- to much infringing content. and on the other side here were these very few people on youtube. and the e-mail that set who cares let's just put this stuff up. let's just go for it. and youtube became much more successful and much better supported and certainly more

resource heavy google product and they realized this to its credit, and overpaid. the edmonton the overpaid for youtube, but at this point i think it actually looks like a pretty darn good purchase. youtube is i think the premier video franchise of the web. google doesn't say whether it is profitable, but clearly they have said that it's making sizable revenues and i think that its employees can make more i think they have a very ambitious plans for it. it could have a much bigger impact on our lives that even the considerable impact it has already. >> i guess the question is yes when but a profit, there's more and more competition like as in many other areas the year facing right now there's just a lot more competition. >> there's incredible advantages. we mentioned the data centers.

google is able to operate a video franchise at a much lower cost than its competitors. building those data centers like that, you know, google gets a huge savings that vantage. the redesign the way the data center's work. they own fire in the grounds, there probably the biggest owner of fiber-optic cable in the world. and so, it costs less for google to do these things than other companies and a few years ago when some were saying they must spend $800 million a year just on the end with, that was wrong. they didn't tell me and exactly how much they paid it was clear to me that those estimates were way over the top. >> i want to get to a few things about where google is now. and i want to talk about china, which you bring it in the book, and china is an interesting -- we haven't yet said don't be evil witches of course google's

unofficial corporate motto they came up with earlier i guess in sort of a little session they needed to come up with a kind of macho. >> that is an early googled engineer sitting in this meeting. getting kind that the meaning of the value and reading these things and people were saying the kind, help customers and things like that. he said we don't we just say don't be evil and get it over with? even though the person running the meeting tried to say that seems kind of - maybe we can spin out more positively, but another engineer like when he was riding on the white board of google it caught on and it turned out to be a sort of useful way to establish a sense of what is the right thing not only for the customers, but for us here at google and the world

of large and leary and speed said they wanted google to be good for the world at large and sometimes we are even going to sacrifice to do the right thing for humanity to read what a thing to say when you're asking people to invest in your company to make money on their investment. >> of course one of the early puerto rico people was always like do you really want to say that because it's a difficult value to uphold for any profit-making enterprise. ultimately you are going to run up against those conflicts. security communications person at google and you hear this statement, "don't be evil," and moves in a sort of secret handshake inside of the company to something that gets out you can just see that it's going to be used as a bludgeon against the company later on. but i was surprised a lot of people at google, even though it is the sort of knee-jerk way to get at google, yeah, don't be evil in this and that and they

see people use it against. >> stomach but the people at google i talked to even though they may not say a lot, they insist it has been a useful phrase and standard and way of thinking for them. >> around china it created within the company and among the moving truck, where i think sergey was not for sure, who came from the soviet union saw what that kind of regime was like as a child, and it sounds like from you gathered this was difficult to read everything they did their from the get go was a difficult decision. >> i spent a lot of time on the china issue, and i was fascinated to see -- i was

covering that at newsweek and actually attended the famous hearing in congress where tom lantos, the only holocaust survivor ever to serve in congress made eliot representing google and other people of the companies ask them are you ashamed because you are going in there but they actually did a very careful analysis and it's not to say how much they were aware of the implications when they made the decision but it was a sort of moral spread sheet and in the spreadsheet does all of these cells and numbers come and some of them or numbers that were in the red it's a loss we have to sensor but then there were members of the more information in china, we are going to open china of and in the long run this compromise we make will be overrated, overwhelmed by the good that we bring, and on balance when you crank up all of those cells in

the spreadsheet we are in the black doing more good than harm. that's what they figured what happened. >> i will say that i was in china interviewing somebody who ended up in the prison and he actually said to me personally that he was at the american companies were there. so it definitely that is the issue to be in china or not as complex. i don't think it's a straightforward issue but they have pretty much pulled back. what was it -- i gather that there was a big breach. what was it about the security breach that occurred that made them finally say forget it, we're just going to be in, we are not playing the game anymore. >> understand what happened with the security breach you have to look back to all the things that happened before and as it turned out, the experience of google in china had been sufficiently troublesome. they had a lot of people who signed on to that spread sheet idea, the idea that google will do more harm had come to the

conclusion that it isn't working and we should think about changing our mind on this, and there were a significant number of people in in the executive suite, executive cubicle's order for you to call them. [laughter] who were in a low-key way sort of are doing we think this and it wasn't just speed it was other key people and things were not working and there were a number of tensions. a lot of people there were very unhappy with the support or lack of that they felt that they were getting. there were -- the biggest issue in china spent a an week interviewing people in beijing. the biggest problem among the engineers had nothing to do with censorship, it was that they were not allowed access to the code base in order to work on the products and improve them just like the engineers in the

united states and every other international office. they couldn't get access to those and they felt that google didn't trust them and i thought when executives at google said actually that is the case. because we don't want to put them in the position where their families might be at risk or there could be someone in the communist party. we don't know and that's the way the we are going to plead, and ironically it turned out that a security violation was what many described to me as the straw that broke the camel's back. >> and was pretty bad. they got access to the code. what was it about that though that just sent them over the edge? i'm sure there were people who were saying stay, you are doing more good by bringing your technology here and some of the people who worked with them felt that way. they felt abandoned. it was within china itself the public in general said you were

not doing that will hear any wait till i say if you have what, 20, 25% of the chinese market that's huge cox. >> they were overcome a lot of obstacles there from sergey's please review much worse than the very serious theft of some of google's intellectual property, and i don't know whether that is, they've never really said exactly what it is, but we know it was pretty important was the idea that whoever broke in and you would have to think it was the chinese government, almost a quarter broke in was targeting the e-mails or the gmail accounts of the chinese dissidents who were using gmail which is offshore to talk to organize protests or just to their personal business

there and that by all accounts infuriated sergey and he took it very personally, and i think that his history designated and he said that. and that was a terrible thing for him and for google. there's one person whose account was compromised at stanford and google wanted to get a lot of right away to see how this worked and they have a security to pick up the laptop, but the break-in was so sophisticated that it evaporated like mission impossible, self-destruct, and it was gone by the time they got the laptop. >> there is a lot of cynicism about the pullout within china and what it was about, and among some in the press, and i actually had discussions with people who felt it was an economic decision and that's why they pulled out and they were looking for an excuse to the estimate i don't think that at

all i think they they were making incursions' economically. there were people who came to believe there was a ceiling of how successful they could be. but as you say, 30% of that market is pretty good and the opposing a tax loss economically for google is that while the android phone system is doing well and making inroads in china, the value to google is much lower because google gives the system away but the system works well with the products and the search engine. so if you are using an android phone in china and it is, that isn't much good to google. >> now certainly not. the other thing i notice now, and i agree to a slightly cynical of the wine kind of relieved sergey had a strong feeling in the company and had strong feelings about it but i noticed a saw an article about facebook during exploration

talking to the chinese and shortly thereafter, i intuitively have a feeling this was going to happen somebody from google say and look we didn't really say we were out of china. >> some of the projects are still doing okay but i think to me the search is the heart of google and if that's gone the have huge obstacles. >> i guess that gets me slightly in to -- looking forward to the impression i wanted to ask now as we move forward the company is facing increasing competition shall finish from facebook and this is where the beauty of google has been this extraordinary engineering and intelligence and facebook comes along which is much more -- it's bad engineering and intelligence but it's much more social and much more geared towards things i wonder our sergey and larry

going to be good at this? the had the opportunity early on to really get into the social space they didn't really take it. is that saying something going for about a troubled area for the company is moving forward? kamarck larry now taking charges he really grown-up? can he really do it? can he move them through this period and compete with facebook? >> it's interesting. people talk about this as if the people on facebook are touchy-feely kind of people. they are engineers, too. >> they seem to have a -- it seems like -- >> there might be a generational thing because certainly you think about it, mark zuckerbeg is a generation younger. but they are men in their late 30s now or getting towards 40, they are not there yet, and they

are certainly of the ceo age, but i think the question is really whether google can successfully integrate into the core. i think now they understand how important it is and in the previous efforts and they didn't treat that with the same pretty certainly as they are treating it now. but you salles as facebook became more and more successful i guess they were the giant google and now google has its attention focused very keenly on this area there. and these assets to bring to bear. they know a lot about the people who use it and a lot about your contacts. we just saw the plus one that was announced this going to try to figure out who you know when

you search for something you will see the folks in your social circle like some of the results that came out in your page so i think that there are things to bear so i think that google is coming out and i think that larry is committed so we will see how it goes. >> i think the of the company that in some ways can be a threat to them is apple which is probably of any company the smartest about how the users use things to i went to a party once i was trying somebody looked at me and said it's kind of like bringing someone from google and someone from apple to a party the iphone is better at parties. it's much more user friendly and so this is -- however interesting incredibly well i wonder will that change now for the verizon iphone how well do you think that they are ill-equipped to kind of move forward and be a little bit more

savvy about how they deal with the public? to have never been good for civil when they will not in excess and nobody could call up and say my phone isn't working and larry was like let them eat cake. >> the customer support has always been people can figure it out on their own and actively at one point i tell a story where someone was figuring out having more people and customer support they should ask larry why do the needed at all? and they figured out these forms people can help each other it's almost like leaving them on a desert island and is a figure out how to make your own house and the 9-year-old somewhere in the mainland. but consumer products that doesn't work so well. but social stuff is the internet. google knows the internet so we will have to see. facebook does so well with and they are so entrenched they are

not going away. they are not going to do a myspace and ignore what google does we that myspace was oblivious to how well facebook was doing. so i think at best where google will succeed is the facebook says what google is doing is important we have to sit down with their and share some information. what really drives google crazy but she's because you have hundreds of millions of people sooner or later it will be a billion people creating information that's important to them that google cannot put in its index. google cannot give its customers when they say find me something. this is important. find it for me. >> and facebook is sort of bringing back the display advertising because they have so much information about you they can actually target the display ad. >> that is what facebook doesn't have. they don't have that magical combination that we talked about

earlier in their advertising. i think people would be happier if there were no advertising on facebook. mark zuckerbeg, i went to the famous session where he talked about how from advertisers he said we are going to give you the chance to put yourself in the conversation between the users, between friends. when i talk to my friends i don't want it in the conversation -- pepsi-cola in the conversation. >> i think you're right. it's going to be interesting to see how all of this plays out. there is one thing before i get to the question from the audience that does strike me about larry as he takes the helm he can be a little arrogant perhaps. you put it somewhat in the book from simon and schuster who called it the whole google book deal innocent arrogance, and the sense that i'm trying to do good, i am trying to digitize the world, this is good, and yet

i wondered if that is going to get him into trouble, too. this omission to do good without also realizing that you are going to hit up against industries that are -- it's not necessarily -- people write books and they are valuable and as you said, speed isn't really -- the don't really get it, the people worked hard on books come in your book for example, and you know, did you sense that about him or -- it came through in the book that is what you were sensing. >> when you write about people like larry page or steve jobs people tend to say there's a lot of writing about steve jobs and there's the good steve and that steve, and there's only one and you can't teach those things out. some of the aspects of the personality which may not be the greatest are probably some of the reasons why she's the greatest of the ceo and i think the same with larry. i would say less air against

them blinders to the effect of what he does. he knows it is a value to the world to have this information there and that's important so he is so focused on that that may be an election since he can get these concerns of authors but when he sees them going up there and come planning and that is sort of the way that he sees it he doesn't have much patience for it, and when he talks about the people who talk about privacy, google is very concerned about privacy. but a lot of people at google don't think much of privacy at tickets. they think of those people are planning an ankle or something like that. and in a way that enables google to charge forward and get things done but it's not going to help them to back much when they are fighting antitrust charges or

justify what they do any regulatory or legal sense. >> as they move forward that's gonna be more of that as they get bigger and bigger. how will change after eric schmidt leaves? basically this week. >> i think that larry started as ceo not on april 4th but on january 28 was the day that it was announced immediately after that i think that he sort of jumped in and started rethinking the way that it's managed, set things up and rethinking how google can reclaim its nimbleness. but in another sense, i think that things won't change so much in that larry's values were always the values that drove

google. and people channeled his love of speed and skill and commission and artificial intelligence. so, in that sense, i think that maybe google would be more of what it is half almost doubling down on googliness. [laughter] >> googliness. he talked about when people are in meetings they shouldn't be talking at their computers and it reminded me that early on the famous story about barry gillard coming to larry page and the whole time he was on his blackberry like this. >> i thought was interesting because at one point they thought -- that was one of the glory of the google meetings is the idea that people could, you know, do their work and come to the meeting and focus in on just the right time and then zone out and answer the the woman as e-mails every googler has to deal with. >> comment on eric schmidt's

conflict with android development. a lot to comment on petraeus and it is interesting. i was talking to him, interviewing him right around that period and a time google was developing the android come eric would have to leave the room, and at the board meeting when that happened and i explored the google adel relationship to some degree because something went terribly wrong. steve jobs apparently came to feel he had been betrayed, that the android is not what he thought that it was going to be. and what he envisioned was a great pair marching off to a world of the digital world because he thought the company is were entirely complimentary and he even said to his employees at one point we are

not doing a search engine why are they doing a phone? and eric would always tell me well, we have it all figured out and we are competitors in some ways and frenemies is a big deal in silicon valley. it happens all the time. but clearly, there was more going on beneath the surface there to the point where that relationship just got fractured. >> yeah. you know, steve jobs was actually kind of mentoring of them when they were younger and wanted them as a ceo. >> he walks with sergey and steve jobs' is respected super highly at google. marisa takes her younger managers and project managers to the keynote to learn how it's done.

so despite all this, you know, you won't find anyone at google who doesn't add my years steve jobs and a lot of people i guess wish that some of that could find their way to google. ..

>> so every company has its flaws. what is google's? and can it be fixed? >> well, we touched on a couple. i think the myopia in terms of their effect on the world that are in definitely something that doesn't serve google well. i suggested size -- google likes to think of it so is david, but there's a lot of guile i guess. >> the rumor as there might be a justice department investigation into s., to which i should add in you mention this book, that

steve hamar, ceo of microsoft hates google and has done everything in his power to sort of put out there is a monopoly. >> i find it so ironic -- [laughter] [applause] >> i covered microsoft and bill gates during that time and i had some amazing conversations with bill gates. and at that point i would've said, if this is something bill gates would not wish on his worst enemy. i take that back. >> i think it's steve holmer who is the one who had a couple reported themes in there. >> i can't repeat what happened in those scenes. >> i do know when i was at microsoft several years ago and this was before google had gotten really big tummies that google is a nice company.

he said we used to be a nice outcome to me in the suddenly we were a monopoly. i mean, this is what he said to me. i remember that because i watched them move forward. how do you see google's recent multimillion dollar path to retain employees affect the morale? >> that's a great question. there's been toward to keep some of its key talent, google is getting remarkably huge sums of money. certainly there is a huge competition now for the most talented people. google has very talented people and they turn out to be good employees at other companies. and i think it could be a big problem there. people come into google, especially for the last few years they don't get the financial gain that the early cougars did.

your google in the earlier stage, especially a couple years before that, you're at a different financial level. and even some undercutting. nice package coming in a couple years ago and google is doing its best to try and repay people. the big difficulty is and how much money. google selects people who are likely to get set up with the bureaucracies. the exact kind of people they look for are the kinds of people when a company gets too big for a great opportunity to starting a company comes up says i'm out of here. i can't tell you how many people leave google who say it's a great company. it's been a great experience. i love the comp me. you later. >> in the book he talked about a few key people who laughed and

went on to example to four square because they couldn't get things done and if there are perceived revolt. says that affects how people are feeling their? >> i think people really -- the employees most of them really like. a lot of people i talk to -- some people came in a couple years ago, a young engineer would come in and find himself or herself working@ad product that may not be the most innovative thing they are doing and google has to do this. a tattoo on the top executives in engineering and he says this is a very difficult thing for us. we have to have people manning these portals. these people have to do these things to keep google going. and i can sometimes tell people, you're doing this when you would rather be coming in now, programming cars.

he might just come a self driving car. as i said earlier, i wished i was on a road of self driving cars tonight because the traffic was so terrible getting here. but as they move forward that's the self driving car and probably a place where the innovation does continue with projects like. >> i found it very encouraging that projects like that are still going on. a lot of people say self driving car, what does that have to do a search? they think it's an example of crazy google going for a deal. i actually think the autonomous car is well and keeping with what google is. it's an information processing device that gathers information about the world around it, draws information from google's index is. the car knows what's around the corner because google maps all these names.

and it's artificial intelligence and during much in keeping with the lot of google. so i think more and more google interprets a mission very, very broadly, that those core elements are very much in keeping with the rest of the company. >> what is google's biggest threat? >> well, in the short term, i would say it's a social thing and face the. in the long term really, it's how much its great success in this area of search and at stops from dominating the next name, the innovator's dilemma. you could say they had a mini leith to overcome not in the mobile world. that could've been a huge, huge problem for google at a certain point in a not terribly distant future there'll be more searches made on mobile is then there

will will be on laptops or desktops. google was someplace very well and the mobile world, that would've been a giant problem. and they manage to leap over that little shift their shared not as big as other ships that are yet to come. it's very difficult for a company that is very, very successful and invested in one area to dominate in the next revolution. and it is, that is what is happening with these. down the road there'll be bigger revolutions that google will be more even challenge to succeed. >> yet come as we watch what is happening with microsoft, they've had a harder time is the world has changed. in the book you say at one point that they didn't see the value of search in the cloud -- he really missed it. >> at one point not long after gmail came out, bill gates visited by "newsweek" office.

>> great story. >> yak on his subject from the thing he wanted to talk about is how spam will be gone in a year. he's not exactly mastered ominous. [laughter] but we finished our conversation were sitting in my editor's office and talking about what products we use and he saw that i had gmail. he asked me about gmail and i mentioned it yet, i'm about two thirds bills quota. he was stunned. he said how can that happen? they must be doing something wrong. what is your e-mail? movies? he was very upset at this in the way google is doing it, things take that. i think maybe you just focusing on a technical issue and how e-mails are stored. in a larger sense, the way he thought e-mail was basically there's a limited amount of storage. i'm sure bill gates intellectually understand how

it's gone down, but he hadn't internalized it in a way where he totally understood down to his bones that storage is free now and you could do something like gmail and a not great cost your company. >> there could be that moment in the future for google, but they don't see it. >> does anyone objectively compare to result today versus earlier? >> google. last night and they tell me it's better. [laughter] >> they must know what they're talking about. this is actually a great question. please comment on the roller speed latency latency and google success. >> as a matter of fact, i think you're going to ask me to read something at the end. that is what i was going to choose to do.

i'll save that one for later, but let me say it's very, very important for google. steve is a teacher and a very important one. >> just a curious question because i figured with all a secret. to what extent is google's meal for success still a secret? be not well, when he is a formula for success, they're not sharing the algorithm. >> how did they get from the coke recipe? >> formula, you could read this book, but it's discoverable what it is. google is to some degree opaque to the outside. internally everyone shares everything, but there's a hard shell. in many other respects a pretty open. in the last couple years they been more up in. things that used to be called lockboxes made an effort to be more communicative and make

little videos to talk about how the apt system works if you go to the papers you can understand things about how the search engine works and there's even some papers in a couple of things that the data centers. so i think if you reverse engineer at google, you could learn a lot decided about how they've achieved success. duplicating is another matter. >> this person gave me a tripleheader because the next one is what is it about their format that other companies just can't emulate? >> some of the things they can in some they can't. you can't build a data infrastructure data center is. takes billions of dollars and there's a lot of innovation, but they're not sharing with us. so there's an infrastructure you can't easily match if you want to be the next google. >> the third question i like them you liked this one too, who would you pick to play larry and

sergey and a network film about google? [laughter] >> i'm going to have to rely on my non-encyclopedia storage of young actors. jake john hall comes to mind. >> yeah, i think jake gelineau. i'm trying to think who else really. jake would be good as larry. sergey? i don't know. >> michael sera. [laughter] >> what was the purpose of hiring friends surf from an ei. he hasn't done much politically. is that an internet figurehead role? what is the internal thinking there? >> i guess when you have a chance to higher your internet company coming of a chance to higher the father of the internet. i think people relying on him

for his wisdom and i think he's a powerful force feast of the d.c. area to talk policymakers and people who watch google is not sense. people listen to him. >> actually come to bring that up we didn't talk about the whole verizon situation. and that's the moment when i suddenly didn't hear him because he had been previously a huge net neutrality advocates. i think that is one of these places where it is a lot of people who sort of believed in it don't be evil suddenly got turned around, which was around the issue of network neutrality, that one website shouldn't be favored over another. and all of a sudden google had this turnaround. >> i finally did weighing in on the side of his employer. keep over wondering when this went out and this is a question

from net neutrality that basically google and verizon together reached the idea that will have net neutrality, but maybe not so quickly in the mobile sense. we won't enforce it so strongly of ogle, which became with the he eventually adopt in december when they adopted rules about net neutrality, which are currently being litigated by verizon. i'm not troubled a lot of people. you have to see to some degree that verizon is a very powerful partner. >> going back to this, can this company continued to grow and really not be evil? a lot of people felt that this wasn't that exactly that. it was a business decision. it wasn't a decision in the end that many can you advocates felt

was going to benefit the consumer. it is a good decision for google, though. >> there in the position google is sent by setting a standard so high. people criticize it for making this business decision, right? it was business that might be good for google, but now people expect it to sacrifice profits for humanity. i don't know. >> yeah, know it gets complex as you get bigger. it's a company nodded that is huge. google's original mission is to organize the world's information useful and accessible ways. how strong is that mission and said that companies today? >> i think it's pretty strong. a lot of people invoke it. they are explaining this product or that project in vain since admission is two organize -- gather and organize the world's

information and make it accessible, this is why the project makes sense. so i feel that's pretty much ingrained at google. it is a useful vision and use them focus for them, and one which i think its employees are happy to place. >> yeah, accessing information is a good mission. it is a useful mission. served them well. now, here's a question you've gone from writing about one kind of rock star to another. how did writing for once not affect your work on this book? [laughter] >> were talking earlier about how he interviewed bruce spring in -- springsteen. >> well, one of the greatest interviews i ever did was when jerry garcia told me technology is new drugs.

[laughter] and i think that the excitement excitement -- you know, when i was a teenager, and the music listen to with great music of the late 60s and was inspired in lots of ways. and i think technology now, why i feel so lucky to be writing about it, to have been writing about it during these past couple decades as the same kind of excitement. it's transformative, can do a lot of good. it's got a flood of darkside, but it's an amazingly rich field to look at. the people are more particular than rock stars. >> some of them. sometimes they're not so good. >> i love talking to the engineers. a lot of time i'll go into

meeting with an engineer and someone will say pretty much an engineer. but i like talking to those people. i think i've had success in learning from it. >> well, i want to give you a moment to read a session from your boat. read about speed and how important that is. so larry and steve, speed has always been an obsession, especially for larry page. he's always measuring everything says early google. it's about latency. more accuracy -- more accurately it's always trying to remove it. like lady death watching kill from her hands. he said medrad jointer ran an internet café with maybe three machines. immediately began looking into a browser there. whether due to pathological

invasion or chronically underestimated that your unsuccessful products, page administered and faster delivery for google since the beginning. the minimalism of google's homepage allowing the lightning quick example. early google also innovated by storing cached versions of webpages on its own servers for and speed. engineers working for a page on quickly enough this priority. when people do demos in there so, 11,000, to one. that tends to get people's attention. actually come if your product is measured in seconds, you dirty field. buckeye are members one time who's doing a gmail demo. he made a face and home mostly to slow. he reiterated a complete, so the 600 milliseconds he thought, you can know that. when he got back to his own office he checked the server logs. 600 milliseconds.

he nailed it. so i started testing myself without too much effort i could estimate time 200 milliseconds predicted to lose 300 milliseconds or whatever and then have been throughout the company. >> well, steven levy, there's probably a million more questions from the audience and that i have, but i guess people at those questions will have to read the book. which was a great read. >> thank you very much. great. [applause]

>> from the harvard bookstore in cambridge, massachusetts, and this is hour. >> it's a pleasure and honor to be here. thank you for braving the rain and joining me here today. so google is 12 years old. its voice hasn't even changed it. it barely another lesson and yet it has been an important part in so many daily activities so many of us. one of the major reasons i wrote this book is the strap man's beard, historically we are, technically we are, sociologically weird that one company would serve as the ones through which we view the world. in so many ways, so many times a day. i am not sure or at least i wasn't sure at the beginning that we should complain about the situation. after all, we invited, we celebrated him a relish it and do it. we google all the time.

so i tried to enter this project with that sense of weirdness, first and foremost. i wanted to constantly remind ms. l. and remind my readers that this is not the natural state of things. this could have gone very differently. to go back to when google was a newborn. he probably had not even heard of it in its first year, 1988, when it first rolled out for public use. it was hosted to the stanford university servers. he founded at google.stanford.edu. the first few notices i was able to find in the popular press refer to it at that url. and even early on, it was clear that google was going to be the darling who were excited about technologically, technologically sophisticated. it accomplished a couple things that have been alluding a lot of

other companies that have been trying to organize the web and help navigate the web. first and foremost, it had a point page or was just a box through which you enter text and generate a fairly clean selection of links. and the links to be an order and the order seemed to make sense to us. it struck us as intuitively right. intuitively relevant. and the great deep google made early on was first of all, use a blank page and at a time, we you remember the web in the late 90s, the web was crazy. it was full of all kind of flashing things, crazy things in every page looked like walking down times square in the middle of the night. it was just a lot of attention grabbing devices onto many webpages. in addition, the major search engines services that the day, yahoo! is still with us and actually not going anywhere for a while.

those services tended to crowd pages of content. some of the content they would actually pay to create. others they would pay to harvest from other places. there was no sense that these other portals to the web understood the web the way google did, right? the folks who started google understood first of all that you and i are perfectly willing to create content that google can then harvest and link to and share with us. and they don't have to pay us. the other insights about the blank page with the blank page was trustworthy. the blank page that i'm not trying to sell you any thing and i'm not trained to take you anywhere you don't want to go. and at a time when it was clear that many search engines are actually functioning of the positions of their search results, google made it very clear or word-of-mouth and most of the press ultimately it is search engine results were generated by their algorithms

purely in their algorithms ready distance from the immediate interest of the company. in fact, the company had no interest if you can imagine until 2003 the company wasn't selling advertising. it hadn't even figured out a model for selling advertising while until about 2003. so for the first four or five years of google six is to, he was there to be great and it were. so in 1998 debut. by the time his 1-year-old, is just starting to walk, it is saturday organizing the web for us, already making it clear to million of web users that the web didn't have to be a copy place, that one could use that to draw a usable map for information, to get from one place to another. before search engines for good, before google reinvented the search engine, one had to find a good starting page and follow a series of good links to other

pages and collect material and sometimes try to guide other people through the trail to replicate the same nation. and it was maddening and chaotic and you didn't know if you're missing some good stuff. most of the time he didn't find good stuff. he found scary stuff are we up for an appropriate step in there just was no method to the madness of the web. so google almost immediately sets itself up almost inadvertently as the custodian of the web. over time, google did something else very clever. google had to figure out what was one link above another? why should one page be more important than another? the term that google uses for the criteria upon which it would rank these links is relevance. which page is more relevant than another? in the early days of web search, the number of times a search

term showed up on a page count for a blog, right? if there were a page about the boston red sox, it might save you talks a lot on that page and that's a pretty good guess you think for the importance of the page to the search. robert meza didn't take long before people figured it out would make a page about something to a different and loaded up with invisible text for common search terms, terms people were using all the time anyway and i would trade people into going into these and related pages. you can imagine pornographers were masters at this very early. pornographers are generally so much harder than anyone doing anything else on the web, largely because it is the only business making money on the web at the time, the big trick for google as it became the custodian of the web was to figure out make the web less expensive, less threatening,

more usable, more pleasant. if you can do that, we figure eventually come using google as an actual person or animal college my 5-year-old daughter who thinks google is a person that i've actually met this person and i go to california to meet this person apparently google invited me to a party one time. i don't know. there's some store she tells her friends. imagine this company got the web in the late 90s and 30 hurt as the odds in many people were not sure how much interaction we went ahead with the web. these are days that it's hard to convince someone doing something like thinking with a good idea on the web and that's probably the end of the list. shopping was raised t., research was risky. americans invent the computer was risky. that sort of back committee was important for one want to make one in the web to make the web a less frightening place. we didn't even notice this was

going on. so google installs more criteria. instead of using this number of times search terms appear on the page, google decided that there's a vote of affirmation. if there's people creating webpages around the world and they happened to be interested in the boston rent out mr. creed and web links to what is an authoritative page, and he actually beat the team's official page for a person has tremendous insight and maybe espn's page. it will start creating links than you to find out what's going on with the rest that, these are the pages to look towards. they don't spell out words, but by creating hyperlink it was a affirmation. the great insight of engineers in google's founders figured this out and ready paper and graduate school, that basically made it so that eight-page's relevance would be scored by the number of votes on the internet. they knew for an espn starts

pointing to somebody's home a page about the red socks. that's a really powerful motive of affirmation. if "the wall street journal" webpage links to somebody's financial advice blog, there aren't actually blogs at the time, but that counts for a lot. it's a major sense of affirmation. those votes are weighted more than if i put appealing to somebody's page on my blog. so that was major insight number one. number two was that you can start scoring results based on the quality of the ph in this happens later in google's history. google starts there certain design elements of a page to work better for us and we think work better for users and readers and those are off next rest graphically and not just

textually. it's not hard to imagine that page is such a trick you into falling into the world will be full of lots of extra video, links that go into strange places and lots of extraneous code, what they call mall where, little programs that embed themselves in your browser and potentially credit to your computer. the bad people in the world will loaded pages for thought not discussing google has an interest again in a can the web usable, trustworthy and pleasant. google starts downgrading scores of pages designed in such a way that writing the score pages designed cleanly, that have keywords in them that relate on this lead to the subject of the page and of course have these listed affirmations. so within a short period of time, the web becomes a trustworthy place. lo and behold this in combination for the widespread use of encryption to get people shopping and the more people's been on the web better it is for

google because google is the starting point. instead of starting links can be good in central place and gives you a menu of places to dive into. you're no longer actually using it in a web way. your plumbing for except when you do a subject search. but again, google is 12 years old. it's an adolescent. his voice is just starting to change. by 2004 when it started remarkably expanding its areas of interest. about that time i started really taking notice. use google for 99 from the time i first heard from some very tech savvy friends that this is the search engine you trust. around 2004 google started launching a number of other projects we're all familiar with objects that google news, projects like gmail and the google books project to which it scans the millions of books and

doesn't libraries around the world, starting with viacom including miss universe d. and then moved on to many others. and this project kind of blew my mind. in 2004 start reading about this project and i start being this amazing hyperbole coming from people who are working for universities and university libraries, big fans of google and people who just bought knowledge to spread. they start saying what an amazing big mistake powerful company is going to spread knowledge to every corner of the world, pretty much for free and i start reading things in all sorts of corner is coming and this is going to unleash information and creates a new light or he could anyone can into. considering factors and, you know google is six years old, right? google at that point was around for last time and brad pitt and jennifer aniston had a merry. look how well that turned out.

i is the university for stanford university asking a six euro company of this immense amount of wealth knowledge. they might start beautifully, but it can't end well. this is obviously a controversial project when it came to copyright. the publishers and authors whose work for skin without permission and eventually lawsuits and lawsuits are settled in the way that made it clear several years down the line that google never intended to make a library. i love bookstores. i'm not too pleased at the bookstore that tries to pretend that the library. from about 2004 started singing that google's corporate mission statement, which is believe it or not to organize the world's information and make it universally is very scary.

i lived for about i know enough about the 20th century to know when someone makes a big fans do not unique to step back and be where because the 20th century in both print to it didn't turn out so well either. not that anything close to chaos and nastiness and horrible tragedy, but nonetheless what an odd thing. what a strange week to run a company and make it universally accessible. our job is to study the web. i knew enough to know that they are organizing the web. the web is not the world. what's valuable or relevant on the web is a refraction of what is wrong the world here you can do this by doing the basic google search for a subject you

know a lot about. you will see pages you may not think of is the most authoritative, but they are the most relevant according to the standards google brings to the table, the best design pages with the most links. but the web is merely an abstraction of the sort of thought that many people on this earth actually engaging every day. think of the number of people who don't engage with the web yet. think of the ways the engage with each other in information that doesn't accurately reflected on the web. important to remember that google itself has value judgment and biases built into algorithms that distill the results in a particular way and there's nothing up to god. it's so much better than the absence. it's a much better than what anyone else thought, but it's not a world and it's not world's information. and i'm enough of a pragmatist and pluralistic think no one is to teach in and no one company should actually have the job of

organizing the world information and making it universally acceptable. the mission statement of harvard university isn't that audacious. i mean, sure the mission of harvard university we have family to educate the young men of new england to be clergy or something. that's what it was originally meant to do. but really that's a stunning mission statement. we're probably all more familiar with the informal model which is don't be evil. every time google does something that causes friction in the world, expensive cars to the streets of europe, taking pictures without permission and people are pretty sensitive about people taking picture without permission and putting it in a database that have bad experiences. they didn't comment databases, but did not experience. people keeping too much information essentially loses in using it to pull people out of

neighborhoods in houston cinema country. but it sent to be about privacy and information we don't necessarily have the kind of level of concern here in this country. we love our trustworthy if nothing else the major corporations. there's been a lot of conflict in europe, tension and stress and friction over the sorts of things. in the united states we have a lot of friction and controversy about youtube, things that show up on youtube in a lot of friction and controversy that the google book program. understanding that every time google is confronted with a situation in which somebody is upset somebody calls for some sort of intervention or regulation, google's basic defense is trust us. we teach you well. we've always treated you well. we have this internal ethics, this internal motto is don't be evil. they actually don't say those words out loud.

the ceo of google, eric schmidt was about to step down to my knowledge is never something not yet been said we believe -- we believe the motto don't be evil. i've never heard him say that. but it's embedded in many things he does a good many other officials that google is a things, the declaration of corporate social responsibility. so i started asking a question. why do we fall for that every time? secondly, why do we think they come to me that had -- that is basically 12 years old will be anything like it currently is in the next 20 years? why would we think that future performance is in any way predict a bypass performance? conditions change, companies change, politics change and we do know in the world of new media of the world of digital communication or market doing with the internet to nobody's came for very long.

when google started, everyone was concerned microsoft would be calling on the shot in our information ecosystem. i bought that. i thought it was true. now google is one we worry about? in fact, google is worried about facebook for some very legitimate reasons in terms of competition for advertising dollars. so as i started stringing together these can earns, i thought it's really important not to come up with the way to sort of distill what google means to us and what we need to google. other really great writers had gotten inside of google and traveled on the plane with the big guys that run google, had told the story of the company, written a biography. in other people had written lots of books about how we can all learn from google or other companies. other good writers have argued down on. my contribution i hope it's solvent for relationship google. what does google need to us and

what do we need to google. what is the nature of the transaction? why does google do all this for me? think they spend so many billions of dollars in services that helped me make my life better and they don't ask for any money from me? what's going on there? v. should be a little suspicious. so what is the nature of the transaction? the obvious answer once you think for five minutes if i might actually go postcards during the very few. i'm comcast customers cited matt comcast all the time. i built to hide, i know i'm a comcast customer. but i'm not google's customer. i am a google sells to advertisers. that's nothing new. i'm nbc's product every sunday when i watch the nfl, rate? nbc is selling attention to beer companies and car companies. so it's not a new model, but i think we forget because of the

depth of interaction and immersion in google. we consider google to be a part of our lives and embedded in our lives. google keeps very good track of our intentions and our desires and fetishes end of session and focus is the results of our searches to reflect what we've are the tool google we really, really like thinking about. that is some interesting implications. and google is changing. so i described earlier the way the google mastered the web, figured out a great efficient and effective way to help us navigate the web, some brilliant ideas about counting these links, waiting these links properly. so in recent years, google has added yet another layer of standards or criteria. but they really focus on now is what they call the user

experience. they want our experience with google to be really satisfying, deeply satisfying and more fun than it has been before in a social way in an intellectual way and the other sign in a commercial way. so they are taking the record of our expressions and desires that we enter in a little box. if sessional. we confess to google what we really want to what we roughly did or should not done. we put them in the google box and get results. it doesn't necessarily associate at text you put into the box with you as a person. it doesn't care about your name for her social security number, but it cares where you're sitting when you're doing not so in most general in the world where you are and can associate your set of inquiries with others who sit in the same general area. tonight also over time if you happen to have an account build

up a pretty rich set of indicators, of the sorts of crazy lake permit certs issues do they come in the streets of, kind of like how facebook does it because we tell facebook all this stuff. he facebook, i like this music. of course facebook's job is to take the data and associated to sign ellis does. well, google is trained to do the same sort of thing that the record of intentions we give google. again, it's not making easily exploitable or easily touchable training and social security number and address. it does nor location in many cases, especially if you have a google phone, mandrake phone that knows where you are almost out of time. or apple knows where you are if you have an iphone. with all of this data, google is increasingly focusing results on you, customizing results localizing results. so you are not likely to come

out with the result that is distant from you is sort of out of here or out of place arrived at the field to which you usually ask a lawyer. that is pretty amazing implications. first of all, that's really great. think of the time they say this. i think a lot about a sports team or a particular kind of car, maybe a car breaks down a lot and i do a lot of searches for parts and repairs. well, google love you save time by not clicking to mention give me results that reflect the sorts of areas, right clicks google will eventually understand i do a lot of searches for that brand of car. that's really great for shopping, for buying. not so great for learning. if we want an information dump that serves us well as curious people, descendents, people treat you navigate the world and

make sense and people try to figure out what the symptoms mean in people try to figure out what going on with health care reform, we might actually be better off not having focused information. we might be better off coming across a set of results surprised us who challenge us, as a result that don't reinforce where we already were and where we already are. we might be better off coming up with a set of result that are particularly care towards consumption. some are better off coming up with deceptively sold that are a mixture of ways to help us to do then is to help us learn. for a dozen years we've gotten very lucky. google has served his interests remarkably well. think a lot attends google is held to to answer the really important question. of course, if you are anyway doubtful or critical of google, you probably went to a second source.

you might've called the laboring or someone has written a book on the subject. you might have clicked on the second page of results pigmented from the same search in another search engine. all of these are very healthy type. another reason i wrote this book is because i want people to learn to use google in a better way. i use google dozens of times a day. a user to find my way to the store. i am not in anyway going to advocate that we not use google. but i'm going to advocate that we use google and a ways away, not a smarter way, a wiser way. i want us to understand critical biases and limitations based into its algorithms and google a public traded company that must satisfy this tired shareholders do it's job number one defense so good at that and so will the data can afford to be good and so it has. for the most part.

even when it's bad, it thinks it's been good. but with all that, we could be better. the real problem is with us. the real problem is we are so at the age of the speed and convenience of that lovely set of results that comes in a nice set of 10 the value attached to each. we trusted so much that almost nobody clicks pass result number three in the first page, let alone clicks on the second page. nobody clicks on the second page. next time you do a google search, please click the second page. we've seen study after study, academic studies and industry studies show that people do not even question the judgment that google makes. people do not question the judgment to the point of clicking on results four, five or six. if people start clicking onto, is it becomes number one. so with all that, i think it's

incumbent upon us to mix it up a little bit, bring a little bit of diversity into our information ecosystem, to make sure what we want google to keep getting better and keep serving us so well, you know, in a way that all we really give it its list of our desires. and that's not that bad of a price to pay to print the value expiratory lives. let's do it any more intelligent and wiser way and understand the risks and costs are. let's understand that we have the power to manipulate the google learns about us and how it follows us. it takes about seven clicks. most people don't want to make the seven clicks. we don't even want to do it on facebook. on google you really can customize what information you gave google to a large degree. if you customize the way google tracks you and if you limit the amount of information google follows about you, you degrade the service and it's real

obvious trade-off once you start clicking on those things. you start seeing google no longer helps you shop itself, but it might actually help you learn better and challenges of obey. as google is utter for shopping a worse for learning, that raises an important question for us as citizens. i happen to think there's more to life than shopping. although not today. shop. shop a lot. but after you get out of here come the doughnut shop so much. but once you think about the extent we depend on this medium on the world wide web, maybe we need to imagine different things. maybe we need to invest more in systems that public libraries and university libraries in that reaches to other communities. need we have to imagine they can build a system it may take 50 years, built a system that needs toys the distribution across road to the point where they

don't think it's impossible, the child growing up in south africa has no disadvantage compared to a child is beaten when it comes to access to information. with the tools to make it happen right now. remake of the political will to make it happen right now. the reason we haven't tested it is google has been too good to us, right? we've been going on belief in a cotton candy is real food. google keeps feeding us great services that simulate this the quality of information, democratization of information in google of course is sincere and i would like a number of web users to increase exponentially. google would love for every 12-year-old in south africa to have access to amazing information and pouring money into such projects and that's beautiful. but we should not rely on this 12-year-old company to guide that effort because over time there'll be her choice is to make in terms of the, hard choices in terms of technology, hard choices terms apart is.

so as a citizen, it's imperative that we started questions about whether we want google to handle all of our shopping and he needs. if we don't and we recognize who in 20 years is almost certain to be a very different company, may be owned by someone completely different like the reincarnated rupert part. who knows what will happen down the line. google won't be the point wake her up with. the mature google different pressures. who's going to know what the world wide web is in 20 years? we didn't know 20 years ago. as they move more information seeking habits and shopping seeking habits to lockdown devices that aren't on the web, but connect it nonetheless in the more time we spent in the gated community of facebook, the less money google will make in the long term unless they can keep expanding its market.

this is an interesting battle we should pay attention to. ugo wants people to be comfortable with the web and is doing everything it can to keep the internet open and free because that's good for google. not just because it's good for us. it happens to be good for us, which is nice. but not everything good for google will be good for us and we have to be prepared for that to diverges. at that moment will have to ask, are there things we want to preserve and extend and build the google should not do for us or could not do for us? under those conditions, you might want to decide to take other summer it. crazy as it may seem, and everyone at take it the old-fashioned public library. more in its presence, power and expansion because that is a reasonable citizen driven good old-fashioned republican with the smaller is to shoot and is

there to help us with information seekers and learners of students as teachers. we take it for granted because it works so well and we make this sort of false conclusion that google sends information to us so efficiently we need the public library last. in fact, americans these days use the public library more than ever. americans these days use them in record numbers. those who visit numbers don't subscribe to broadband access at home. in fact, they can't write a check to comcast for broadband. that's what we have to remember because arcola citizen should be for maximum empowerment of all citizens. of course consumers should be to get the best prices and that such a different way of being in the world and i think it's time to start taking both roles seriously at just one. thank you brain much. i'm up to us questions. [applause] yes, sir.

>> i'm blown away at the presentation today in electing we should worry as google isn't good enough. i'm concerned about the search traces that google collects about individuals. what happens if we learned that something bad or something i'm afraid of or about some threads i read about? for the person. or gambling surely you know about incidents a few years ago supposedly anonymously woman was fingered by congress osha's security number and given the wikileaks debacle the preservation and security of the tree says this enron, which is going to go away for the first time you have to release said.

>> so a couple things to remember about this very case now. everything we do in the electronic environment is trisha bought by somebody in google may be low on the list of potential problems here. and i say that because first of all google has done what it could do under our laws to keep federal investigators away from fishing expeditions in data. unfortunately for us in google, are last on the site of the government. so that's the problem with government in google. this is an important part of this. we become so dependent on companies eating well. we've become so dependent on this demanding that the companies we use in our lives trueness file and there is comfortable that we forget that sometimes it's not do them.

the fact is their readers rosabeth laws that not only did investigators way too much power that has no real oversight and accountability embedded in it and that didn't happen too long ago and didn't seem to be changing for the better in recent months either. ..

and so what, those companies actually don't want to be part of that, don't want the responsibility of the expense to be the custodian of that information so they aren't defending our interest there defending their uninterested just seems most of the companies do more to protect us if they can. they'd rather be on our side than the government, but not out of love. it's actually out of concern for just having too much of a hassle and expensive hassle. nonetheless we're losing those companies. so, you are absolutely right to deacons about the fact any of us could get snagged in some sort of a fishing expedition per data. it's too easy to come up with false positives in these animals as games, and we have already seen the case of a number of innocent people dragged into the bad situations. it took years to extricate themselves because they happen to have the raw data points in the system. that is a much bigger problem. i'm not writing that book. i'm angry enough but i'm not qualified to write that book. now, i'm not antigoogle, but

what i'm against is our own faith based embrey seven google and that is why i think there will be times and privacy is on of these areas -- there are times when we left onto -- in fact i do want to -- and took the part of the state to restrict the information these companies can hold about us and the manner in which they called it. i think that's important and it's more important every day. now, that is an argument we need to have come and it has to occur at a better level than trust us, we have never done wrong. right? that's really where i'm coming down. i feel we need to be more responsible citizens and more engaged users and we do want to use the power that people have, which at times actually involves the state to take care of our interest. another question? >> google scholar start at around the same time, 2005, 2006. google scholar was an idea that came out of this policy that

google has inside where they let employees spend one day a week 20% of their time working on projects that don't serve the bottomline at google. they are not above the prime project. and a couple of folks at google decided there's all this scholarly literature that's really helpful and might be really valuable to people outside of the scholarly environment. i get access to this amazing collection of information to the journals by virtue of working for the university but if you don't work for the university or go to the university, you're out of luck because you don't know it's there. so they invented google scholar and they got permission from all of these scholarly publishers to come through and what google index their information to provide access to the articles. of course if you have used a you know if you are not in the university environment you generally have to be ultimately for the article that you find but at least you can find the article. so that is great and i think that is a super thing up to a

point. the problem again is how they do a, how they do the search system for one thing because the body is is built into the engine. one thing about the scholarly articles as they don't leave it to each other. i write a scholarly article as i have and my friend jonathan his son of a professor rights the scholarly article even if they are about the same subject even if we cite each other in the footnotes there's no electronic link, no hyperlink light on the web and that is the magic thing that google follows so what makes googled and frank one results over another? nobody knows and i used enough to know that it's not dependable. but again, just like with the web search if you do the same search a week later you get different results. the instability is maddening to someone who needs to pay attention to where articles or to review of research to find

what you wanted your grazing around a subject area it is maddening. again poorly designed and google doesn't make any money they are not likely to make it better. they don't need to. it's good enough so i tell my students especially graduate students starting with google scholar is fine but there's going to be a lot of articles that it does not show you and the only way to do that is to walk through the professionally built index is available to the library. but again you to be affiliated with the university to give baffler full access and that's a shame. that should be on the agenda of what i call the human knowledge project, this plan to give everyone a decent access to decent information. yes, sir. >> i want to make a comment about when you said about the government getting access to the browsing habits and what ever. i felt from what i've read that the federal government has -

control to a i thought was a standard situation at this point. >> what happens right now is [inaudible] that's just an fbi agent saying i want to do this, and it has not only the power to compel someone like a bookstore for instance to hand over records of what people have purchased but it also has deniability built in so that the subject of that security letter is not allowed -- i'm sorry, the firm that is handed that letter is not allowed to tell the subject of the investigation of its existence so you don't get to defend yourself if you're being investigated. >> is dispersed patriot act? >> yes and no, there's national security letters but there are other things, other elements of their investigative power that

come from earlier laws in the clinton years, and basically what we have now is a system in which if you are a really bad person do you really bad things you don't have to worry about any of this powerful investigative power because you are going to use strong encryption and in a really smart way because it doesn't take that much investment so the really bad people in the world are totally east keeping from the surveillance states just a dumb people. and you have read about them. they got arrested for being dumb and coming up with plans that were never going to work because there were too dumb to know to use encryption and they've met in public places and use e-mails and degette in boston and then everybody cheers but we have a really absurd situation that people who want to do really bad things are basically outside of the power of the law and so the fbi, which has to show that it's doing something ends up snagging people who perhaps are not that dangerous. >> i was thinking more of the browsing pattern, the tracking

patterned if people would go in search of information it's not a question of sending -- there's also the intercepting messages and reading them and that sort of thing but a source tracking patterns of anyone which are maintained is the question of where are the people going to with their browser, what information of accessing, what stuff are they getting back? what they are doing, not necessarily -- in addition to what the packets are and the information coming back to them, but it's a question of the patterns on the net one also a concern about that. like if a person wants to go to afghanistan and check around and it's important to the cia to know that. >> it could be and they could get into the server logs and say i think what is happening right now is one of the isp like at&t

and comcast, whoever is the web server and the towers and what better. they are fighting i think the federal government accessing to those the web servers themselves in the isp and that is a very contemporary legal issue at this point. >> all of this goes above and beyond the service which is what i concern myself with. i think there's a much larger challenge both in terms of enhancing security and enhancing justice and i don't think we are serving either of those goals with the current system but that is a mother what i haven't written in the unlikely to read and is probably not the subject i should be addressing out here on c-span. >> yes st islamic a couple questions you talk about google being a young your company and about its life span in human terms which doesn't seem terribly accurate. a restaurant that is 12-years-old is a really old restaurant really, very mature

and especially given your comment about how fast it changes, i don't know it seems likely disingenuous to me to compare it to an adolescent because a 12-year-old human being is an adolescent. so i was wondering if your comment is -- >> again, is that even the length of its life a relevant issue? >> in the internet company years it is actually quite old and established. but that speaks to my point i think in a stronger way than my cute way of expressing it earlier. and by that, i mean that because internet time is so compressed the, 12 years as a time that demonstrates its power and success and its ability to thrive and you can look at the return of the quarterly reports. that said, we know the environment shifts so quickly

and the nature of the company shifts so quickly and internet company years or so compressed that we -- for that reason we can't expect it at 20 to resemble what it is at 12th but to be around 20. i mean, general motors has been around about 75 years and that's pretty impressive but it's not what it was and it almost wasn't a year ago. that's a long company but it is an industry that is heavy and buildings that last, an industry that basically bought off the government and made sure it had german subsidies not just legally but that is a different game. that industry has a different time compression factor than the internet industry. so you are right. i wanted to really compare it to the older institutions with deep roots that are ultimately i think the proper ecosystem. libraries and universities and not just limited to the average

universities but the sense of the collective culture, the notion that we should i think have a diversity of interest and we should respect the gather wisdom of these institutions to the people who work there and not just be dazzled by them. that was my point. yes, sir. >> [inaudible] -- higher education. i'm curious what to see is the biggest danger or threat it poses in that particular environment. >> it is cheaper and free and, you know, universities right now are under pressure to do with the can for almost nothing so most universities that i know of are now considering if they haven't already shifted e-mail hosting, and that is at least with students of not for the staff and faculty and what is going on with that is basically googled it's a customer for life and of the graduate and a student wants to keep that e-mail consistent because he or she already has a job search information for instance, that

person is going to remain a customer throop and e-mails it's a nice trick for them. but nothing really sleazy about it. the dangers of course dug universities are supposed to keep the highest level of privacy respect for their students, and that is compromised once you shift important information to a third party and i am not convinced that in that instance and instances where professors are being urged to use the google documents service in the class is and as a part of a course where those cases i'm not convinced the universities are looking out for the best interest in all cases you're going for the cheap and easy and not necessarily building in a proper safeguards through the negotiation because there's almost no reason to negotiate for someone giving you something free. but that is something that in the real world someone is trying to give you something for free on the streets you should be worried, you should be negotiating because that is really not how it's working in the university's.

so, any record of students' grades in any way like a paper that's been greeted your comments about performance or a conditional letters i happen to write for a student are not supposed to be distributed beyond the authorized recipient. so if i write a recommendation letter in which i will often say how a student performed in my class, only the recipient of that with the student's permission is allowed to read it and the student has to waive their right to read it himself or herself actually according to the federal law. and any great report can only be shared with the student. i can't even tell parents with a radar, which drives parents crazy. so that's the sort of -- but that's important because you never really know who you're dealing with on the other side of the phone. is, respecting the sort of relationship and treating students as adults is a really important part of the culture of our institutions and of the federal law. and i'm afraid we are letting it slip in a lot of different ways. when we invite facebook into the classroom and youtube into the

classroom we are encouraged to do increasingly we've done a lot of risks and i don't think that we have fought it all the way through. >> you're talking about you don't really want to touch upon the idea of the research and how the fbi gets their information is kind of leak, but other than using the library and other sources, how can we manipulate using google and the information they get from us without using it? >> you can go to the privacy settings and come up with a comfortable level of privacy settings but when you do that you limit the functionality of its services. the other thing is just to know if you are aware that everything you tied into google's search box is used in some way, either by associating it with you in some way or collectively as part of your community, then you might actually be a little bit careful about how you construct research. you might want to turn off the ability for google to fall you for certain searches and turn it back on after figuring innocent searches or surges that might

not be in country. there are clever ways to use google with the tools they give to the problem is that the faults are set and the always set for maximum vacuuming of the information. so google wants you to be already comfortable and not suspicious and therefore willing to give it everything to be used in every way and shared as widely as possible. the default is always maximum to read it is up to unfortunately to treat ourselves to be wary, to be careful and then take action. i think this is the wrong way to have a system and i wish that our law we would actually make it so the companies have to convince us to turn on the spigot. so the companies have to say by the way, if you let us collect the following information, we will give you a better service and this is what will be. that is an honest transaction. but to have the default on the maximum and have us have to guess what we should set it to that's actually not very honest

and so for a company that proclaims to be responsible, i think fundamentally its deal with us is dishonest. >> how google response to its competitors is interesting but i work at the publishing company and so, how it interacts with apple and amazon is a particular interest to me and last week or two weeks ago apple comes out and announces they will have magazines and charge publishers 30% and google says we will do the same thing for 10% hauer the kind of responding to the marketplace? >> google has so many competitors. think about the fact that google was a mobile phone company and so nokia is a competitor and so is apple and so is blackberry. that's one market in which it has an intense competition. in the area of publishing google has built a bookstore but it's also trying to offer sales and

access to electronic versions through a system and the deals they negotiate with vendors and publishers are for -- thorny. i'm not a big fan of what you're doing with the library content but i'm not actually that upset about google. i'm not upset the university library suffers and went through this major corporate welfare deal without getting enough out of it and of protecting our interest. if google wants to do this and critical things to make money from it i have no problem with it but what google was doing and publishing of the periodicals and books. undermining the powerful position of amazon for a number of years amazon is the problem in the publishing industry, and if i can sleep in one book i read write a book about amazon the amazon would make sure that i would never sell the book. who knows. actually i'm sure that amazon doesn't care what the books say or what's inside the book to

read amazon just wants to sell items. they sell wigets and that is the problem they are good at selling them at a cheap price and by driving down the price and considering every book to be a commodity rather than a discreet cultural item they do great harm to people who write books for a living and sell books for a living and publish books for a living. at the same time, people who read it's a great deal so that is the massive trade off. it just so happens that we subsidize, we have huge government subsidies for amazon because if you buy my book in this or do have to pay sales tax and if you buy on google you don't have to pay sales tax. oh i didn't say that. but we of the government policies that make amazon richer and challenge stores like that and that's a shame and that shouldn't happen but it is the case. amazon has had a heavy hand of all of its negotiations with publishers. it's been dictating the terms in terms of the percentage the publishers get and the royalties the authors in some cases and

it's been trying to forestall the price of electronic books to this, the level of $9.99 and by doing that it doesn't respect the fact publishing is not that simple. every book is not going to yield a return of it is priced at $9.99 sensitive consumers get used to paying more than $9.99 and consider every book whether it is 100 pages or 400 pages to be worth $9.99, then you are going to have a really tough time selling books that we know can't sell more than 500 or 1,000 copies. i'm talking about scholarly books mostly that we know might fail or are likely to fail and silly 2000 when they thought it would sell 50,000 copies. right, for books like that it's important to come up with a price point that actually covers the money that is sunk into the production process. but amazon wants to disrupt the and treat all looks like a commodity. so, what's happened with the competitors like google and abel doing its bookstore, and with barnes and noble doing its electronic bookstore in a lot of independent publishers

contributing electronic books in the new and interesting ways as well and that often gets lost in the newspaper coverage of this industry. you have now more players who are able to work with publishers in gentler and more competitive ways and so publishers now have the ability although it is rarely happens to say no to amazon and that wasn't the case before that seven or eight months ago or a year ago to say no to the amazon in terms of the distribution as the electronic distribution but now there are enough competitors and google is a big reason why coming and i know a lot of people in the publishing world are thrilled that google is involved in it because google is not out to cash in and a big way on the sale of books. that is when to be a major site project for google but always a side project. and so google's role in the industry is to roll with newspapers, the role of magazines over time i think will be beneficial leftist that is what looks today to all of those

industries and i am really happy to see them deal in a less coercive way. to see google deal in a less coercive way with the publishers because if it were just amazon we would all be in trouble. yes? >> i was just interested when you were talking about everybody going to google. and i noticed that certainly microsoft in two areas slowly being incrementally encroaching upon google's kunkel coming and i was wondering if people are just becoming more aware like supporting the searches so that google doesn't have their whole history or also the battle not only have we mentioned about higher education in the clout with windows and google for the kit 12 information. so starting with when they are little ones the digital natives. so, you could eliminate on that. >> in the competition. so, in the united states google has for the last couple of years had 70% of the object of the.

and that number doesn't vasily change because as most of the new users it is taking from yahoo! which is actually a partner so in some ways it is a zero sum. it is taking some of the searches away from google a little bit but google is also growing. and google is growing not so much in the u.s. but it's a growing tremendously the across the wilson in western europe google has more than 90% of the searches in most western european countries. in places like the netherlands and portugal was 96%. and i actually don't know why. i don't know why google is more popular in europe even though it is held under greater suspicion. we live google in this country but we don't use it as much as the people who fear it over in europe. it's kind of weird, that's where that's happening. there's tremendous growth in africa and the tremendous growth in the arab nations and in india where google has managed to come up with multiple language search

engines for the various 1420 languages in india. it's come out with most of those. i lose count right now how many to. no indian company had the audacity or the money to sink into the complicated linguistics challenge. google did and so they're actually are a number of on the ground search engines in india that have failed because google now not only can take you through a language search in hindu or rocky but can take you through a of really effective search and the language of commerce in india which is english. and so, the growth of india has been tremendous. the two places that google has not been able to grow our russia and the people's republic of china. and actually, google is not so strong in japan or south korea for different reasons. in south korea, the government of investor early on in a search engine that specialized in the korean language and every language is a different

challenging search. because the syntax is different in every language. so doing these relations in terms of a complicated thing and does well in english despite having one of its founders born in russia it's not that good apparently committed within russia, there is a strong sense of nationalism, so they are much more powerful and popular than google. even though there's very little web censorship in china of course you have the explicit web censorship and a huge four any relationship between google and the people's republic of china, and you have a number of search engines that are sponsored by the or at least allowed to thrive by the government and there's a number of other reasons why the search engines do better in china than google and google is actually doing worse. now, that said, in the united states and that google is actually much more concerned about facebook than it is about bing. bing is explicitly shopping. it doesn't fool you. nobody goes to bing to search

climate change. you go to google to research climate change and it isn't always that great, right? but you go to bing to dhaka and airline ticket, buy shoes. it is a decision. you never see a commercial that says you bing to find out about dinosaurs. it's not going to happen. they are not interested in a grubby you that we because it's harder to make money that we. it's hard to make money with dinosaur links. but, for that reason, google is adjusting to what bing is doing in the market by becoming better for shopping but more importantly, bing wants to keep you happy with the ( and less time on facebook to read that as a competitor because the dollars are in the ad and they are freed facebook is going to manage to leverage all of that information we give facebook about the things we love and the people that we love and turned it into a really efficient advertising machine. so, so far facebook hasn't mastered which is why our facebook pages are filled with ridiculous ads that are inappropriate to less much of the time.

but everyone is pretty concerned and confident facebook will crack the code at some point soon. >> the federal investigators agencies [inaudible] -- extensively in the last several years. and its database, you know, context is quite incredible. >> thank you. appreciate it. thanks for coming i will sign books. [applause] the book is available for sale. thanks for joining us this afternoon. >> coming up on booktv, the author of the net delusion describes the dictators use the internet to suppress space movements.

in the net delusion author discusses how the internet helps to prop up dictators and can hinder space movements. he talked about his book at the new america foundation in washington, d.c.. this is an hour. >> thank you so much for that terrific introduction and for giving us a platform tonight to talk about the book which based on my experience over the last two years is guaranteed to provoke, enraged to disturb and deeply upset half of the audience so we will figure out by the end which have far the

cyber utopians and which half are the cyber surrealists tonight. but no, i couldn't be more to publish this book which has been interesting for me and for all of us of foreign policy to take shape over the last couple of years and in many ways we have watched sort of the live-action on the internet evolution of the thinking session that we have gone from the early days a couple of years ago where the afghani were sort of father wondering and thinking in half hoping that there was something called a twitter revolution occurring in moldova. flash forward to today. not only a rehearsal of the publication of his book, the net delusion, the dark side of the internet freedom, which kind of tells you where he came down on that. you know, i am reminded once again of how circular our conversations are and here we have the would be twitter revolution in to nisha according

to andrew sullivan just this very afternoon. so, i think that i'm looking forward to sort of jumping right into the middle of a conversation with these subjects, but i have to ask you first about steve. can we have a twitter revolution or to really become cyber realists we have to give up all of our utopian and revolutionary fantasies about the liberating power of the internet? >> a think much depends on what we mean. if we look at what happened in moldova, the initial promise there was that twitter and social of mediocre actually instrumental in getting people. later on, some people, myself included, began wondering if maybe the actual impact was in publishing what happened in moldova and getting it on the front page of "the new york

times" which happened, and that happened mostly on the computer because by then it was still in the technology and was 2,009, and it is a very novel event. you fast forward to now and see the event is happening in tunisia being widely covered on twittered but they put on display because twitter is used so it's very hard to think about what a twitter revolution is, whether we have this constantly changing definition. if you look at iran and the revolution there, the initial promise was that again, it was instrumental in the mobilizing. that is almost a direct quote from an dressel than who've made the wall and publicized. she was the one who i think

basically shaped but coverage to a great extent. leader of course many people like in the case of moldova notified their position saying that while let was used for mobilize but still held at the headlines again and was 2009 and that mobil factor more or less were off. there are still people watching the event indonesia over twitter and they are blocking a and tweeting everything they see that i haven't seen much that isn't available yet. maybe it will emerge later that twitter, the technology was the driver of the rest and in tunisia it is held to the government has them constantly hacking. they've been hacking into their facebook accounts and gmail much was surprising because i haven't encountered before the social media was playing and it is the

driver many people expected to be. >> the second time a little and tell us why you decided to write the book and what were your own journeys from the cyber utopian and today much more realistic take gone on the internet can deliver in terms of political freedom. >> i was born and raised in -- >> [inaudible] >> no, but close in a small mining town of troy. so we had our own environmental problem. but, so i was born and raised there and course, to know, the subject of the democratization and the subject of the promotion was always the year to be in part because i always watched very closely what was happening

in belarus and to a large extent that response was never satisfactory as far as i was concerned. so, that and i would say in 2005 when there was a lot of buzz in the world and what about what media can in the political change and remember, that was just a year or so or maybe even less after the elections here were and still talking about what was accomplished with the media and there was a lot of hope that blogs and social networks would actually be instrumental in helping people to mobilize. also just in terms of the context you have to remember there was a lot of enthusiasm. still a feeling in my particular part of the world that the social media would help, but the

protests, the people's power such as he was on the right. and that, you know, it's happened in serbia, georgia and ukraine into this and six we expect the same thing to happen in belarus. something happened in turkistan said that was this sort of excitement that would continue and to put the rising power of the social media in this bright future of the freedom agenda and you end up with a really solid and assistant assumption that social media and the new media and such will let chollet play a huge role in the democratizing the world. so, my first day after college was actually working with an ngo based in prague and using the new media to promote an immediate change but also the critical to the colonel democratic in the form of solid space and the local positions aligned i can the director of the new media.

so my job was actually traveling around the region meeting with activists, journalists who are mostly in the position and talking to them the power of the media and how they can use blogs and social networks and to mobilize people, you know, it was a very optimistic kind of who take on how you can actually put the internet to good use. of protest but also small things like when the corruption or blogging about the environment. i mean, it all differ from country to country and i spent roughly three and a half or two years getting to know very closely with a lot of the founders who work in this case and i actually got to know a lot of people who were eager to the free agenda where there's the national endowment for democracy

more open society. so i got to know a lot of people who were making assumptions about the power of the internet and you know, i spent three years doing that and by the end of my stand i started seeing that not only where some of our projects not having the desired outcome many of them actually were making things worse in part because i think that there was very little thought put into the right to development were motives and that you need for creating the media project. what happened is that most of the country's civil talented boulders and entrepreneurs who were already in the reading on their own and then you had all of those u.s. agencies coming in with a lot of money forcing the incentives up to the point where

they stopped innovating and they would be innovating and half a slice of different speed knowing that they can get another grant of the field in the first place. so, i started having a lot of back-and-forth about the viability of the model of the country's part of social media's about was kind of the first but then i also started looking a bit closer how the governments themselves weren't responding to the internet and if the very beginning it was very boring standard response all they were doing is banning pages and surgeon keyboard urls. over the years i was doing this work i realized the response was becoming much more sophisticated and now within the will of the cyberattack said the websites and the opponent's it involved

hiring and paying the new media under doors and bloggers who created their own government projects and it involved bonding technology and to engage in the online surveillance of the activists and blockers and in the case of russia for example they have an oligarch with the kremlin and the entire company which was the leading platform and still is and what russia which came as a shock because it was a lot of american users and suddenly that happened and many people i think rightly so began to expect that there would be a lot of negative changes in the. >> and nobody was, calling it. >> very little was chronicled. the harbor side of the depression was chronicled and the censorship and the

sophisticated ways covered somewhat systematic overview of what was happening and it is the case basis this is more or less how i can to this subject and realized that was something of their own was full of paradigm in which many people in this town are making decisions and the assumptions that they made about the government's response but also the ways the locals would be using it for the purpose and how it would undermine them for the political regimes so we had to take more time off and focus more on the space as much as we could but also fight started working on this book and, you know, so that more less why i came to this.

it was all through more less empirical the work of me getting to know many of the problems as someone who worked for the ngo and eventually a position to be disconnected you think that what it was the green revolution in iran the was the key to the point for your view when you can to see the consequences of getting it wrong analytical the >> was a tipping point in terms of understanding there are assumptions of that in washington. there was definitely understanding that it is something that i found very politically naive in terms of how the u.s. government are at this stage but the initial doubts about, you know, the power of the internet was much earlier than would be 2007 where it will began.

but i never had much of a connection to the u.s. government side of this until i would say in 2009 and part of it because i think there was not much engagement from the u.s. government and the agent is of course funding and using it in the news where of course there are active in this space since probably the year 2000. it was never systematized in any kind of a freedom agenda and i'm not sure that there was any strategic master plan for what is being accomplished. much of the project that involved the media and my understanding was the broad kind of political and social project that we were implementing in those countries. so it was just an add-on to what they were doing but i think with the action of obama and the kind of worship of the things in the

media that characterize his campaign was much more to push for the digital from more strategically and they began seeing the technology obligations on the execs going on trips to foreign countries to try to sell american technology to the local areas and the first of those who was i think it was in 2009 it sprang to iraq. then of course a famous outage from the state department and the protest in iran which also makes a model from the book. eventually it all came down to the internet freedom speech of hillary clinton in january, 2010 which convinced me this book is a project mentioned which is not just examining how the

government response to the internet but how the american government, the american political establishment thinks about the power of the internet also thinks about how to use the internet for their own agenda and their own policy. >> that's right. there is a lot of image to your book when you get around to this book that in its own way your argument is in its own way the internet freedom agenda is as miss kafta as boesh's initial freedom agenda was. and in the sense of the unintended consequences of almost certainly labeling this as the u.s. government policy i think that is something most people are not familiar with that argument but once they start to wrap their heads around it and think has the obama administration succeeded in politicizing something that until now sort of all the bad guys around the world they themselves were seeing this as a tool and not as an instrument of national power projection by the united states. you know of is that how you think the bad guys will get to

google and gmail in a way they didn't two years ago? >> yes. but actually, i would like to expand the remarks because i think that you are keeping the key issue here. you know, of course we all know that there was a lot of support that the u.s. government was giving to the freedom before it became the freedom agenda. and, i think more less since i just outlined up until now there was already a lot of work that they had various agencies and foundations who were actually doing this in the new media space before the emergence of the digital diplomacy. so, you know, what i think happened is the u.s. government just -- you would thought that probably the c department they do have the means to shape the

global a sort of raising their voices also on this issue. i think however the efforts were numerous and before i get into that we also have to remember that the freedom agenda itself you could -- it was never really expanded to anyone other than in that speech and in that speech itself it is much, you know, much more rhetoric than the actual framework and policy proposals to that speech. but the problem with that, that speech eventually -- it is examined in conjunction not the policies of the u.s. government against the department of which for example the technology that i mentioned earlier is one and the several with -- the one big

dinner the clintons posted for the ceo and so there are all of those defense which technically are not related to the freedom agenda but they get lumped into one once we start looking at it because it is all the same actors in the room. it's google and with the ceo who goes to iraq to digitize the architect of the national museum. so many of the story's basically interconnect in ways that i think the government did not foresee. but my problem in the freedom much and if you want to call it that is that it just -- they didn't succeed in building, juneau, any reasonable connections with the rest of the u.s. government policy on the internet. and, you know, it became obvious on the response to wikileaks which many people in the world took to be hypocritical.

and again become a hero don't want to be unfair to the u.s. government. many of the calls to get the of wikileaks off of the amazon servers can from the senators and talk shows and what not. they didn't come from someone at the state department, but most people in the world still interpret that as a hypocritical speech, and now the reaction many people actually for the first time read the speech after wikileaks happened because they realize that it just is a poor response. many positions expressed in the speech didn't correspond to the actual actions and the climate of debate in america. so, and it's not the only element if you look at the other -- >> that people would be interested. okay, so you are saying that the internet freedom agenda isn't really compatible with how the government has pressed the to perhaps understandably responded

to wikileaks. but as you're own view on wikileaks and whether that represents some disturbing new trend, is it something we should welcome, how does it fit into your analysis? >> you know, it definitely fits into it very nicely from the cyber angel because i think -- its de ramus technology from the very beginning to discuss wikileaks because it is something coming to the technology now it is not -- they do not have an identity so they keep changing and in the four years that they have been around they probably want the entire year conception model, four, five, i don't know how many times. so if you look at the additional approach, that i think was -- ninian the business community and the political community it isn't that, you know, wikipedia is the guide to success in the modern world.

everyone will be cooperating. people will come together. they all have enough time. they just sit there and they are waiting for the data. if you look at some of the earlier statements from julieanna staunch and now his comments of 2010 describing his views back then, you do feel that he also bought into this, you know, the -- to the world of collaborating journalism and people coming together and collaborating doing this stuff if you look now you can move a different in the ideology where all of the cables are published by the means of media some of them have that but most so forth so they definitely moved in terms of their approach to the relationship. sweating that change has been that interaction. on the other hand, i still do

not understand what value wikileaks as an organization brings to a problem. i mean, they are a core asset as the technology which allows people the documents and this technology by any newspaper in a matter of days it wouldn't cost more to of with that. and if you want to submit a wikileaks foreign policy website it would be very easy to do. so -- >> we will talk. >> the question then is whether they have the value, and you can make the argument that they add value in having in the network's through which they can contact the media and ngos and there are probably some global problems on which they can make the argument for everyone else but if you want to learn something about corruption the

chances are the fact that the "washington post" carries a corruption for much of the difference but that is a different subject. but my point is that it meets the future because i do not see what if the value that wikileaks asks in the process and here they just may be falling victim of the internet which is more or less all about disrupting the intermediaries and getting them out of business. it's easy to compare them to the newly emerging model of the open of weeks. they have even though they haven't properly launched yet, their ideology is we start building the newspapers for the newspaper website and more or less prominent role wikileaks wants to play. it's not certain that ferc said

last week i did for the new republic i go back and assange should become a literary movement for building the infrastructure and the commercial companies and because that movement is already moving you do see a lot of projects which want to remain the man management system or the made a payment system for the posting system so many of them are emerging to the great extent because of the reaction of the u.s. government. people have understood that it is probably not safe to have the u.s. government be the most powerful country of the internet and have american companies be the most powerful intermediaries because once someone crosses the government would be able to pursue them to the american companies. so there are a lot of

interesting bottom-up project which seeks to address that so it may be to work more on those projects the infil weeks itself so all sorts of options, their usefulness remains the same. >> you actually point out a very interesting -- we haven't talked that much, we talked about the u.s. peace of this, but what are the consequences of looking at the world of the internet activism more through this real list that you talked about. we are talking about a sort of nationalization in many ways of the internet so instead of google as a universal player you analyze that they remain a u.s. company and have u.s. values good and bad, but there are some starkly potentially very negative consequences that come about if you proceed down the road here.

does turkey get its own national e-mail system and that sort of thing? what do you see happening as a result of people being newly caucus and of this u.s. role and owning the internet? >> i think there are two factors. first what i discussed is this attempt to embrace the power of silicon valley in terms of the promoting some freedom and democracy and twitter and facebook there is definitely this fear that, you know, twitter is trust the outfit which many government simplify quite a bit and the perceived the american technology at this point. the sick and i suspect, and this brings us back to the contradiction in the agenda is that american law enforcement and the intelligent gathering agencies actually also want to remain on the internet and it is easier for them to have their conversations and, you know, you

get that in the silicon valley asking the same companies that are to promote freedom around the globe to be billed back doors into the systems. and so what you end up with is gone, you know, governments concerned about the fact that american technology may even surely lead to washington and coming you know, the conversations may actually be, you know, monitored. so as a result i think what is happening is that there is the effort and i think there is the trend that i see in countries like russia, china and russia where in turkey as you have mentioned there is a lot of talk about trying to replicate some of the key functions needed and the information society is a e-mail, search, may be social

networking even though i doubt they will come to social networking but for example now that there is a push in some of these countries to cultivate national champions who would be able to do it all domestically, store all the data in the country and comply with the local while the embrey form to any of the demands the would come from the national governments. thus it would be the kind of problem that research, the kind governments want to keep that the debt at home. the do not want the data to go elsewhere because they want to have access for it wherever they need. and so, there is this element of the government's rebuilding in the systems and search engines trend that i am seeing is growing, you know, the uneasiness about using american

software, so you have for example it was interesting that putin and russia for example mid december signed this very long executive order ordering that all of the russian public institutions switched by 2015. by the economic considerations for sure because again you have to people these costs also, but my understanding is that such efforts are delivered mostly by fear the and the proprietary software is just harder to monitor its code where if you compare it to the solutions and open source solution just, you know, minimize the risk that the back doors leading to america so now you have the iranian minister of information saying they want to build an open source operating