that, you know, some of the nuclear facilities might be compromised, and again we all know that because we already had this problem last year. ..

the fact that now rules the visitation order sheet change kind of fact her is an additional fear to make it easier for governments to decide that. >> so, just a pullback to sort of the high-altitude question that the book raises, you know, the book is largely pitched as an american ideas. we are by nature taught from our second decade of believing that the internet is transforming our world very largely to the good, even perplexing and a selective ways. where do you come down at this point in recognizing you might be evolving to in your views on this? okay, so what's wrong with having an anticorruption website in azerbaijan or an environmental law in russia?

are mobilizing people in outside support the protest movement? this clearly is a powerful tool for any kind of political express and organization or activity as we know it you're in the united states. so what's wrong with that? are following prey to a certain extent at the very thing you are critiquing, which is this is a tool after it can be good, can be bad. >> you know, is a little disclaimer, i also am affiliated on the board of the society of the information program. >> what we do is understand how you actually use neat opening up. so to me, there's really no question that the internet can be useful. so many of the initiatives you answer, you know, one sides more

important. what is happening, all of them in themselves. the question really is, from the perspective of someone unlimited source is, you know, and someone also who has a lattice political and historical baggage and is likely to be interpreted in some ways in some countries more than the other, whether as an american person may not. so my question really is, you know, how do you ask someone who has good intentions, sending to actually maximize the actual internet while minimizing coming up, the impact of previous

history of the wonders likely to have a strategy. this is why i'm trying to out i'm a strategy because i think that right now our entire paradigm of thinking is wrong because it's full of assumptions and most of those assumptions are assumptions about how the internet works. yes, opens up governments for exchange, but if you know nothing about azerbaijan committee he could stand, if you don't know much about the culture or political insults your force of the country, it's unlikely that you'll realize the kind of impact the internet is likely to have on it. so part of my agenda is to

transform this to be on the impact of the internet in the abstract to the impact of the internet in the context of the environment. so it hurts to forget because to a large extent, the logic will be shamed by what's happening locally. they need to be much more attentive. if you come to russia and think they're good guys who are fighting the government and then there are the bad guys and there's nothing in between and you just analyze how the powers covered, which is lose 99% of the changes. so you have to consider how the facts of the role of religion, nationalism versus minorities in

russia. i'm actually the guy who's saying that the internet isn't informative. >> it's not always for the good. >> well, it's not everything for the good because many of the processes are not themselves the democratization. so yes, many of them will be amplified, but the sort to get to this point were we can acquaint the dangers of democratization, we first need to examine the exact political culture or social contact to transform. we are bound to end up with different policies, which now will be able to aggregate. i mean, to me the problem is that there are differences. their institutional and procedural differences in terms of how you can approach this. there is technology to spend days thinking very hard about

how technology will transform russia. or we can do the exact opposite and start with something about russia and the region and on the internet will do that. i tend to side with the power and the technologists because there is not so much that the internet does. the transaction cost makes mac's information that they had a just don't know how that was also the factors are likely to affect the environment and mussina with the environment site. >> well, you know, for most of it a place as any to bring your voices as well and hear what you have to say about this. it think it's one of those conversations that were going to be having five years from now in 10 years from now. >> i hope. >> really struck by in many ways the parallels between the

example your comic given the internet facilitates stalin in russia as much as it facilitates -- more than it facilitates western democracy. and look at al qaeda on the internets i think it's a. that fundamentally challenges our fear that the internet is a force for good. well, it also turns out to be an incredibly affect the pool for facilitating this underground group that wishes to communicate anonymously across countries and continents for their work. and i think we've come to the realization of that over the last two years in a way that wasn't immediately obvious in 2003 and 2004. if we can get your questions, will try to do as many as they can always still have time. we'll start here in the front row of an move backwards as

quickly as we can. give us your name. [inaudible] >> hi, robert schroeder, international investors. thank you for the talk in the book. just today we thought there was a report out that our own government has been requesting the twitter records to see those that may have been looking for information. there is also a report mentioned today that the senate subcommittee is upset that apparently there has been some cyberattacks, cited offense directed by some of our intelligence community against

other nations if they were not informed of when these were conducted. we are undoubtedly seen better own government is getting involved in this. you see that there'll be any efforts made to restrain our own government in the future? how would she say this balances out against what you fear other governments might be doing? >> effort by whom? >> the u.s. government. >> outward in some form. >> i mean, if they tough one. there are definitely signs that there is much more concerned about the impact of the internet and the national security. up until now, wikileaks in part now discovered that there are a lot of people around the globe who with the help of their computer can launch a

cyberattack on a site like paypal. that's not organized crime. in new york and elsewhere, people are compassionate about wikileaks. you see the financial threat that the internet, you know, poses. i'm just not sure that the congress is any less generous if you want to put it in those terms about the internet. i mean, you know, the first actually is extremely i think concerned about the internet, has been calling for an internet kill switch to have a button to turn it off, to prosecute anyone connected to wikileaks to deliver. so i just don't think that this change will come. it will come from contrasts.

they appear actually much more aggressive. then the government itself and they are the ones who are viewing the department of justice and the action to a sans. so i think if anything, they change will come probably -- the pressure will come from some of the kids who are not yet part as the companies and are still a load off silicon valley, who are concerned with the action. and i don't know if the pressure of civil society will be enough. but as lawrence said a few years ago, all it will take a -- i don't think that's a change for the better. if anything it's a change for the worse. you know, so my response is we

have much more power to shape that. so i'm not particularly enthusiastic, but he also don't think that there is much pressure you can expect to come. it's not russia or china will be speaking out or the european union more often post privacy policies. , the day support from the cyberwarfare to the areas of cybersecurity now putting up in the european states. if you actually want to look at the volunteers say bernie during peak times. so they have a bunch of geeks who call themselves an official entity, a say bernie and

cyberattacks come to the defense, which may not be a bad idea. but i don't think the europeans are any less, you know, aggressive when it comes to cyberspace than americans. >> the next congress action is the cyberreserve forwards. more questions, please. >> the cyberpeace corps. >> probably not that one. yes, sir. >> yeah, now the most important issue in the contribution i would like you to suggest what will be the stretches to utilize

the internet to their own advantage. and also now, the internet has become the national solvency issue. but that name each country focuses their own information and this is going to be very harmful to the international relation. thank you. >> well, the initial question was about the way in which opponents, you know, opponents of climate change can use the internet to battle it out. i mean, utc allotted to nihilism have been on issues, not just climate change. some of that sticks around deliberately by areas.

on this information and of course that is happening. you remember that the subject of debate in the last 12 months was a bunch of e-mails because of the hack on the server. we'll definitely be seen somewhere after to present the evidence, but all of that applies universally across many subjects, not just climate change. so in this environment you do need to be much more outfall about the efforts of information. but i think the consequence of this, especially deferring the management can only be one

particular party, one particular computer. others will be able to share than and that's an interesting start a week dollars yesterday on the idea of providing the most secure digital rights system. but i don't think anything specific other than, you know, cloud computing because the servers are generating a lot of energy. other than that, you know, it doesn't do much for connection. >> we have more questions in the back. i can't see him that well. yes, right here. >> i think you agree that the internet is a destructive technology and generally ruled that smaller organizations respond better to disruptive technology than large

organizations. in what way is this responding to the challenge of the internet internally to disruptive countries like iran, india and china? >> i think they are much better than i think most of us thought in the past two decades ago. but i have to go with the assumptions and projections and i think the assumption was that either, you know, cut down the internet for democracy and human rights for the economy collapses because we talk about the information revolution and globalization needs a network in technology and information in order to grow.

and i think more or less up until now, it's still very much information, transforming the government. i think the governments have actually been much better in some of it happened because the tele- theatre at the cost of the private sector, so these companies that came to make money in these countries more or less take on the cost. the private chinese internet companies adapt by law with unlawful content from the website. so the government itself you have two higher end the ones who need to take care of that. the everything had been published which is one of the more provocative ideas in the book is that it is also

customization happening right now. we are beginning to see smarter systems emerging to basically make a decision on the spot they used to be centered, not only on the content that is being accessed, but the identity of the user that is trying to access the information. so my prediction is you will be seen in a country like china gil c. the makers to contribute to the economy and will be able to access any website they want because you can actually monitor the internet years, the "financial times" that represent bloomberg and other investment banker says their friends and they look trustworthy. on the other hand, if you look at what human rights activists, it will be the local government

internet. they have neither access of online trends. and of course this will help the government to escape this problem of the dictator's dilemma, where dictators either sign it the internet to basically suffer the consequences. they can still let the internet and, that being much more selective. and all of that is driven by the same logic that digital advertising contributes. it's all about customization, showing you the app that corresponds. the only difference is still just be the logic will be more or less the same banal about customization and that's one way

in which governments manage the environment. >> you need to be a subversive 19 in order to be a democracy activist in the future. i think we have time for probably one or two more questions. okay yes, here. >> hi, sam dupont from global mobile. i am nearly done with the book and enjoy it very much. my question for you has to do with the ends missteps as you describe it. and i think you do a good job of popping the bubble of utopianism in this technology. and i guess my own feeling about the state department's work is

with the been trained to do is introduce an old-fashioned bureaucracy into new type allergy. and the missteps have been caused if anything by assorted access the success and bring this technology to the work of other departments. anything to do a good job of describing the mistakes they've made. and i wonder how you would -- you don't necessarily in the book it too much into prescription -- [inaudible] >> okay. >> do want to give you the opportunity if you do have ideas about how they could do a better job, how they would go about it. >> i think for me i try to be as much government independence so

to say because i think what we need to get right are the principles, not the particulars. so, it's not just america that is trying to do that. you also now have, for example, the dutch government which is extremely trusted and many other european governments are promoted. so the way in which i am that describing the book is not a description of the bureaucracy and the state department. it's an abstract framework approach. i do believe that much here in the past, whether it is a sent to consider. it was centralized and you have

power over decision-making, and making decisions as to whether the internet systems were made in china for azerbaijan or russia or belarus. i think people who are in a much better position to assess natural impact of the internet of those countries than people who know everything about the internet. we can read blogs all day and don't know not to. so much of it has to do i'm kind of how they actually learn this an ideological stuff and learn the way in which it works in the world. my own experience is the reason why there is so much is because the media area is internal structures from highlighting

positive changes, in part because, you know, often it's the pro-western democratic who are the only ones who want to speak to western media. you do not necessarily run into conservative who want to talk to abc. they just announced bbc as imperialist lies. so the stories we get to hear all have to do with the interest of civil society and secular culture and whatnot. so i think my overarching point is we do move whatever framework we end up deciding on, we do need to be extremely careful about the processes by which we learn, that which we decide to make decisions. i think once we have all those in mind we can then start thinking that needs to get more

power and whether we did actually someone will be highlighting the american companies and let american companies do the job of publicizing correction to the u.s. government. so that's sort of the matter. there are many problems outlined in the book by the gross and cyberattacks and ngos, which are global problems in nature. they do require solutions with multiple internet service providers who inquire much work can be done by the regional unified chain russia and human rights. but they think they will just need perhaps a different mechanism. they do not think that the

presence of those four, five, six global problems or to require global solutions will justify an entirely internet savvy approach to thinking about the political power of the internet. >> i think that's probably a good note to end on. i always thought it was absolutely impressive than somebody who comes from belarus and who is that so deeply about this failed utopia of the 20th century should be guiding us through -- or i should say pushing us against our own utopian when it comes to the story of the next century. >> it's a great hook and you can follow them on twitter. you can follow in foreign policy. he's doing a big up to everywhere. the profile is coming up in the guardian tamayo says will be leading an entire generation towards a new future of cyberrealism.

i don't offense true or not. then this bad line. but i think this book is come as you can see from tonight's discussion going to get a lot of attention in a think you can pick up copies they are and thanks once again to our house. thank you. [applause]

>> in his book, "the plex," steven levy describes the inner workings of google in mountain view california. this is an hour and 20 minutes. [applause] >> hello. so, i guess i'll just say to, y, begin with, you know, about 15ru years ago a couple of grad studentsde at stanford set up sp in a dorm room and said d something that called page ranky and one of them was named larry page 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 dotsor ..rning 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. so it cost less for google. a few years later, we are saying they must spend $200 million a year on bandwidth. they didn't say how much, but it was clear the estimates are over the top. >> so i want to get to a few things about where google is now. and i want to talk about china. which you bring up in the book. and china is an interesting, you know, -- we haven't yet said don't be evil. which is google's unofficial corporate motto they came up with earlier, i guess, and figured the session they needed the model. >> right, that was paul buckheight, a google engineer that was sitting in the meeting. it was a meeting of values where someone was was -- human relatis was writing the things on the white board. be kind and, you know, help customers and things like that.

he said why don't we just say don't be level. -- evil. get it over with. even though the person running the meeting says that seems negative. maybe we could spin it more positively. another engineer almost like kilroy was here, writing in the white boards of google. it caught on in a useful way to establish a sense of what's the right thing. not only for customers, but for us here at google. and for the world at large. and larry and sergey always said they wanted google to be good for the world at large. sometimes we are even going to sacrifice profit to do the right thing for humanity. what a thing to say when you are asking people to invest in the company to make money on the investment. >> one the early pr people was like do you want to say that? it's a difficult value to uphold for any profit making exercise

prize. ultimately, you are going to run up against the conflicts; right? >> yeah, if you are a communications person at google and you hear this statement, don't be evil. and you watch in horror as it moves like a secret handshake inside the company to something that get outs. you can see it's going to be used as a blood ant against the company. oh yeah, don't be evil. they do this, they do that. people use it against them. >> right. >> you were the guys -- >> you are just making profit. >> yeah, but the people at google i talk to, even though they may not say it a lot, they insist it's been a useful phrase and standard and way of thinking for them. they don't regret it. >> now around china, it created fights within the company and among the ruling founders.

where i think sergey was not so sure. he came from the soviet union saw what that kind of regime was like as a child. he was very uncomfortable going into china. and they had to weigh this, and it sounds like, you know, from what you gathered, they weighed this very hard. it was difficult. everything they did there was difficult. >> right. i spent a lot of time on the china issue. i went to china a couple of times. and i was fascinated to see -- i still had news that i was covering at "newsweek" and attended the famous hearing in congress. where tom lantos, the only holocaust survivor to serve in congress, made the people representing google, are you ashamed because you are going in and censors. they did a careful analysis.

it's tough to say how much they were aware of the implications when they made a decision. they constructed it was like a moral spread sheet; right? in the spread sheet, there's all of the cells, all of the numbers there. some of them were numbers that were in the red. you know, it's a loss that we have to censor. then there was loss. we're doing to put more information in china. we're going to open china up. in the long run, the compromise will be over weighted, over hemmed by the good that we bring. on balance, we crank up all of the spread sheets, we're in the black. we're doing more good than harm. that's what they figured would happen. it doesn't that easy. >> i will say, i was in china interviewing somebody that ended up in prison. he actually said to me personally that he was happy the american companies were there. it definitely is that issue of whether to be in china or not is complex. it's not straightforward.

they have pretty much pulled back. what was it? i gather there was a big breach, what was it about security breach that occurred that made them say forget it. we're going to be in hong kong, we're not playing the chinese game. >> understanding what happened with the security breach, you have to look back to all of the things that happened before. as it turns out, experience of google of china had been sufficiently troublesome. they had a lot of people that signed on to the spread sheet idea, to the idea that google is going to do more good than harm had come to the conclusion is isn't working. we should think about changing our minds on this. there were a significant number of people in the executive suites of google, i guess they are not executive suites, or google, or whatever you want to call them. who were in a low key way sort of arguing that we should rethink this. and it wasn't just sergey, it

was some other really key people. and things weren't working. there were a number of deposition -- tensions from the china child. there -- china side. i spent a week interviewing people in beijing. the biggest problem had nothing to do with censorship. they were not allowed access to the code base or work on the products and improve them, just like the engineers in the united states and every other international office. they couldn't get out of those. and, you know, they said -- they felt that google didn't trust them. i talked to one executive. he said, actually, that's the case. because we don't want to put them in the position where their families might be at risk or there would be someone in the communist party. we don't know. that's the way we are going to play it.

and ironically, it turn of the out that a security violation was what many googlers described to me as the straw that broke the camel's back. >> yeah, it was pretty bad. they got access to code. who was it about that though that tipped them over the edge. i'm sure there were still people saying stay. you are doing more good by bringing your technology here. some of the people that worked with them felt that way. they felt abandoned. within china itself, the public was saying you weren't doing that well. i say if you have what, 20-25% of the market, that's huge. there were a lot of people. >> right, they did that over coming. a lot of obstacles there. >> right. right. >> i think what happens was that from sergey's point of view, much worse than the very, very serious theft of some of

google's best intellectual property. i don't know what that is. google has never said what it is. we know it was pretty important was the idea that whoever broke in there, you'd have to think it was the chinese government or someone supported by the chinese government. whoever broke in there was targeting the e-mails in the e-mail accounts of disdense, of china disdense, who were using gmail offshore to talk and organize protests or poston them, you know, or just do their personal business this. that infuriated sergey. he said that. it was a thing for google. there's one person who's account was compromise that was actually at stanford. google wanted to get her laptop

to see if they could see how the evidence worked and sent their head of security to pick up. the break in was so sophisticated, it evaporated. mission impossible, self-destruct. it was gone by the time they got her laptop. >> there's a lot of cynicism about google's pull out within china and what it was about. among some in the press, i actually had discussions with many people who feel it was an economic decision. that's why google pulled out and they were looking for an excuse. >> i don't think at the all. they were making incursions. i think people believed there was a ceiling to how successful they could be. as you say, 30% of that market is is pretty gad. -- good. i think the real loss, economically for google is while their android phone system is doing well, making end roads in china, the value to google of

that is much lower because google gives that system away. but the system works very well with google products and the google search engine. if you are using the phone in china, that's not much good to google. >> certainly not. you know, the other thing that i noticed now, tell me, i'm going to be slightly cynical about it. i am inclined to believe that sergey had strong feelings and the company had strong feelings. i noticed an article about facebook doing explorations and talking to the chinese. shortly thereafter, i had a feeling it was going to happen. somebody from google says we didn't say we were out of china. >> no. they are very emphatic says they are not out of china. they still have engineers there. some of their products like maps are still doing okay there. but i think to me the search is the heart of google.

if that's gone, they have huge obstacles. >> that gets me to -- slightly -- moves me forward to the question. as we move forward, the company is facing increasing competition from facebook. it's had a -- this is where the beauty of google has been the extraordinary engineering and intelligence. and facebook comes along which is much more -- it is about engineering and intelligence. but it's much more social. and much more geared towards things that i don't -- i wonder are sergey and larry going to be good at this? they had the opportunity early on to really get into the social space. or to, you know, they really didn't take it. is that saying something going forward about a real trouble area for the company? moving forward? can larry -- will larry now taking charge, is he really a grown up. can he do it? can he move them through the

period and compete with facebook? >> it's interesting. people talk about this thing as if the people in facebook, you know, are touchy feely kind of people. they are engineers too. >> i believe it. they seem to have a better bett- >> it might be generational. think about it, mark zucker zuckerberg in the internet. we talk to them as young men. they are men in the late 30s gets towards 40. they are not there yet. they are certainly of ceo age. larry is. i think the question is really, you know, whether google can successfully integrate those products. and into it's core there. i think now they understand how important it is. and in their previous earlier efforts they didn't treat that

with the same priority as certainly as they are treating it now. but, you know, you saw as facebook became more and more successful, facebook, i guess, mooned the giant google. now google has it's attention focused, you know, very keenly on this area there. google has assets to bring to bear. they know about the people that use it. they know about the context. we just saw product plus one. they are going to try to figure out who they know. they will search for something and see one the folks in your social circle likes one the results that came up. there's things to bear. so i think google is committed now. i think larry is committed to this product here. so we'll see how it goes. >> i think the other company in some ways can be a threat is apple. which is probably of any company

the smartest about how users use things. i went to a party once. i was trying an iphone 4 and a droid x. somebody looked at me and said it's like bringing someone from google and apple to parties. the iphone is better at parties. it's user friendly. android, however, is doing incredibly well. i wonder will that change now you can get a verizon iphone. how well do you think, you know, they are equipped to kind of move forward and be more savvy about how they deal with the public? they've never been good, for example, when they rolled out the nexus and they had no -- nobody could call up and say my phone isn't working. and larry was a little like let them eat cake and talk to eat other. >> well, their view of customer support has always been people can figure it out on their own. actually at one point, i tell a story where someone was figuring

out how many more people in customer support they should ask larry for. why do we need it at all? they start the google forums where people can help each other. it's like leading with desert island, figure out how to make your own house. the manual is someone in the mainland; right? but consumers products, that doesn't work so well. but social stuff is the internet. google knows the internet. we'll have to see. i think facebook does so well and they are so entrenched so they are not -- they are not going away. they are not going to give up and do a myspace and ignore what google does the way that myspace really was oblivious to how well facebook was doing. so i think at best we're google will succeed is if facebook says, you know what, what google is doing is so important that we have to sit down with them and share some information there.

what really drives google crazy. they are going to create information that google can't put and give its customers when they say find me something. this is important to me. find it for me. >> and in facebook, they are bringing back the display advertising. they have so much information about you, they can actually target a display ad, you know? >> that's what facebook doesn't have. facebook doesn't have the magical combination that we talked about earlier in their advertisement. i think people would be happier if there were no advertising on facebook. mark zuckerberg went to the famous session where he talked about how to advertisers. we're going to give you the chance to put yourself in the conversation between our users. you know, between -- you know, between friends. when i talk to my friends, i don't want pepsi cola in the

conversation. >> no, i want coke. yeah. [laughter] >> no, i think you are right. it's going to be interesting to see how all of this plays out. there is one thing, before i get to the questions from the audience though, that does strike me about larry as he takes the helm. he can be arrogant, perhaps, you quoted someone in the book from simon and schuster who called -- this was over the google books. innocence arrogance. larry's trying to do good and digitize the worlds books. this is good. yet, i wonder if that's going to get him into trouble too. the mission to do good without also realizing that you are going to hit up against industries that are concern -- it's not necessarily people write books. they are valuable. sergey is not -- they don't get it. people have worked hard on books, your book, for example.

you know, did you sense that about him. in came through in the postthat's what you were talking about. >> when you write about people, there's a lot of writing. there's the good steve and the bad steve. there's only one. you can't tease it out. some of the aspects of the personality which may be not the greatest are probably some the reasons why he is the greatest. i think the same with larry. some of the -- i would say less arrogance than blinders to the effects of what he does there. he takes the books. he know it's a value to the world to have the corpus of information that anyone can search. that's important. he's so focused on that, maybe in intellectual sense, we can get the concerns of authors. but when he sees them going up there and complaining, and he

says that's the sort of way he sees it. you know, he doesn't have much patient for it. when he talks about the people who talk about privacy. google is very concerned about privacy. but a lot of people at took -- at google don't think much. think they there's people that are out playing some angle or something like that; right? >> uh-huh. >> and in a way that enables google to charge forward and get things done. but it's not going to help them too much when they are fighting antitrust charges or justifying what they do in a regulatory or legal sense. >> yeah, i think that's what -- because as we move forward, there's going to be more of that as they get bigger and bigger. let's take some questions. first one, certainly good. how will took the change after sergey leaves? well he's basically -- >> yeah, i think larry started as ceo not only april 4th, which is the formula day, but january

20th. which is the day it was announced. immediately after that, i think larry started -- jumped in and, you know, started rethinking the way google is managed. and stepped things up in certain areas and started rethink how google can reclaim. i think periodically, 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. people channeled his love of speed and scale and ambition and heart official intelligence. so in that sense, i think maybe google would be more of what it is. it's almost doubling down on googliness. >> doubles down on googliness. i did read the memo. when people are in meetings, they shouldn't be typing in

computers or anything. it reminded me, early on, the famous story about barry diller coming to see larry paige. the entire time larry was on his blackberry like that. >> i thought that was interesting. at one time, that was one the glory. that idea that people could, you know, do their work and come to meeting, and you know focus in on just the right time. like zone out and answer the ill luminous e-mail that they all have to deal with. >> comment on eric schmidt position on apple board and conflict with android. >> uh-huh. >> you'll have to comment. >> it was interesting. i was talking to him and interviewing him right around the period there. at a time when google was developing android, eric would have to leave the room in the apple board meeting when they happened there. and i explore the google/apple

relationship to some degree there. because something went terribly wrong. steve jobs, apparently, became to feel he had been betrayed. the android was not what he thought it was going to be. and what he had visioned once was as a great pair, you know, marching off to, you know, rule the digital world. because he thought their companies were entire recomplimentary wasn't to be. he even said to his employees at one point, we're 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. ..

whereby people have to freeport their holes on a quarterly basis and, you know, there is a peer review how product, so for a company which cherishes a body of style there is a lot of paperwork that they have to do and it's funny the style but i find that kind of interesting and the biggest one is with google as called okr that is thought of at intel but google takes it weedy beyond the way that it ever was before and which are these goals which are the next quarter and the next year and the divisions of goals of okr, the whole company will have a okr and everyone shares those. you can go on the internal web

site and see everyone's okr and they give you a number, and later you'll report, you know, how well you did on the okr and what percentage you did, what number, and out of ten, if you do ten that's not great always because that shows you were not in the scene of, you were sand bagging it. so like a six or seven is a good okr fulfillment at google. [laughter] okay okr is one of those terms we use. they have these whole series of acronyms. that is another way that people talk more freely like master about vernacular and you say your okr gps and said okay -- >> speaking in this whole other -- >> he is one of us. [laughter] >> so every company has its flaw. what is google's and kanabyan fixed?it ix

>> well, we touched on a couple of the am i. i think the myopia in terms of their affect in definitely somet 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.5

test book tv continues with the author of a critique of held

google filters the internet. from the harvard book store in n cambridge massachusetts this is an hour. >> spearman it is a pleasure and honor to be here. thank you for briefing the rain >> it's a pl and joining meea today.tod. so, google is 12-years-old. its voice hasn't even changede e yet it is barely an adolescentor and yet it's been an important part of so many daily activities for so many of uss. 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 ..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. ..

>> they don't want thebil responsibility collor expense. not like they are defending their interests but just they want to protect us if they can. they would rather be on our but not out of love but concern for having too much hassle. but nevertheless, you are right to be concerned any of us could be snagged in some sort of a fishing expedition for data and we have seeni the case of a number ofar people drug into bed situations because they have the wrong data points in the system that is a much biggerig problem.t i am angry enough to write i that book but not qualified.

i am not anti-google but i am against our own faith based embrace of all things of google. that's are times when we may want to and in fact, i dofa want to invoke the power of the state to restrict the information these companies can hold about us. that is important every day. that is an argument we need to have. other than trust as we have never done you wrong. we need to be more responsible and engaged.wnsthat we do want to use the power that people have which att times has them take care of our interest. >> 2005, 2006 to google

scholars came out of an idea that the policy they have. and for those that don't serve the bottom line.azin a couple o folks decided what did is liable to people, i get access to this amazing collection but if you don't work for university you don't go two university in our out of luck. they invented google scholar and got permission to comesr through and let google index had their information.e if of course, generally you know, youve have to pay but

you could find the article. but the problem is how they do it.on one thing is they don't link to each other. my fringe jonathan ebitdalt day are about the same subjects there is no electronic link or hyperlink that is the magic thing that google follows. how does it make one result over another? i know it is not dependable. to us like with webster's if you do the same search one weeks later. the instability is bettinged the debut do thes exact title or author search you

generally find rewind but if you are grazing around it is maddening. better than nothing but poorly designed.e if they don't make moneyed they do not need to make ittell better. is goody enough.walk i tell my graduate students do not stop at the google scholars. there will be an art at -- a lot of articles they do not show you. it's a but you have to be affiliated with the university to get that access. that should be on the agenda of the human knowledge project of the 50 year plan to give every by the deason access to decent information nu >> and what you said about aho government gettingwh

access but i thought from what i had read the federal government has a control zero or request and then the fbi agent says not only the power to do this of what people have purchased but the subject of that security letter i'm sorry, the firm that handled that could not tell the subject of the investigation of its existence. you cannot defend yourself. part of it is parts of the patrio t act but there are

other elements of the investigative power coming from earlier losses and what we have now is a system if a you are a bad person doing that theya must the don't worry about that investigative power becauseat you will use strong encryption. so the bad people are escaping. just the dumb people who got arrested coming up with plans that would never work because they use the mail and met in public places then there busted budget we have the absurd situation oftt e those who want to do relieve bad things are outside the wh power of the law law. so theh fbi has to show it is doing something snags those who are not that dangerous.

>> look at the browsing pattern over tracking pattern, there is a problem intercepting messages but as far as tracking patterns which are maintained in the sir logs, what information they are accessing, what they are doing, it is in addition to the packets and what is coming back. but the motion pattern and bond fund that? they are concerned about that. you must go to ap website in afghanistan and kicked around there.

>> that the fasb and at&t and comcast or whoever isey a your sir is fighting government access to those with the isps. that is a very contemporary legal issues. >>t this goes the bond -- above in beyond the search service. there is a much larger challenge in terms of enhancing job security and we aren't serving either of those well. this is probably not the subjects they should not be addressing on c-span. >> talk about google being a young company in adolescent in human terms which does not seem terribly accurate.

a restaurant is very mature talk broadcast of thet changes come a just seems slightly disingenuous because it is the adolescent. what about dan the company terms? isl that even relevant? >> you are right. internet company years it is quite old and established but that speaks to 9.stronger than my cute way by a internet time is so compressed, 12 years is the time it demonstrates power and success and its ability to thrive. look at the balance sheets to see that as well.or

that said because the environment ships so quickly and internetts company years are so compressed, for that reason we cannot expected to resemble at 20 what is at 12. general motors has been around 75 years and not what it was an almost wasn't one year-ago. but that is have the building this that had to make sure it had tremendous subsidies to make it happen. that is a different game. that has a differents a time compression factor. i really wanted to compare it to the older institutions with deep roots that i think are the proper custodians of

information which arend libraries and universities. not limited to them but our collective culture. the notion we should have a diversity ofi interest tos respect the gathered wisdom and not just the dazzled. >> i am curious what you see is the biggest danger or a threat to its opposes. >> university's right now are under such pressure to do what they can. now considering to shiftstin their e-mail hosting with google. because basically when the student graduates and they want to keep it consistent

because they have a job search and permission, that person willan remain a good goal customers so it is a nice trick. but nothing sleazy. the danger is universities should keep the highestr levels of privacy for their students. that is compromised once you shift to a third party. i am not convinced that professors are being urged to use google documents and not convinced universities are lookingt out for the best interest but going for' cheap and d.c. not building and proper safeguards. but in the real world you should be worried and in

negotiating but any record of the students' grades or comments of performance or recommendation latere fo at -- letters are nots supposed to be distributed beyond the authorized recipient. if i write a recommendation letter only the recipient of that is a loved to read it. this student has to waive the right to read it themselves legally. i cannot even tell parents what a the grades are whichar drives parents crazy.s so respecting thatd tr relationship to treat them as adults is an importanttion part of federal law.dera i am afraid we let that

slip.e inviting facebook and youtube into there classroom, we've run a lot of risk and have not thought it through.n' >> you don't want to touch on the idea of how information is retrieved butothe other than the library had you manipulate using google and the information they get to and not just talk using it? >> you could do the privacy settings but then no it limits the service is but just know everything you type in isifin used either byco associating it with you or collectively then you may be careful how you construct a search for you may want to turn off the ability to

follow you for certain searches or then back on. cou there are clever ways to useve google but defaults are a always said so google wants you to be comfortable and not suspicious and give it everything. but it is up to us unfortunately too new trainer supposed to be wary and care fault and take action in. this is the wrong way. i iw wish our laws made it so of themp company's had to convince us to turn on this big it. by the way that is an honest transaction.n have the default on maximum

to have us to guess? that is not very honest. for a company that is the default. >> what about its competitors? i work with the publishing company. how it interacts with apple and amazon. two weeks ago apple announces they will have magazines than the next day google says we do the same thing at 10%. >> google has so many ca now it is a mobile phone company sois nokia and out of our competitors. and blackberry.t in that it is one market it has intense competition. ♪ is to the same system thatls

those deals that theyw negotiate are thorny. i am a huge fan of what google is doing in the publishing area but not the library content. i am not upset university libraries are suffering and went through the welfare deal without giving enough thought of it. said they want to make money i have no problem. but what it is it doing in publishingtan is but amazon is the problem in the publishing industry. if i could even sell one book i would write it.a but they would make sure i

would never write it. wha [laughter] amazon just wants to sell items.d widgets. they are a good in the efficient to drive down theing price to consider every book a commodity they do greatg harm to people who writeth books and publish books for a living pratt the same time, it is a great deal. it just so happens we have huge government subsidies. if you buy my book on thea i amazon but we have gov government policies to challenge stores like this.e that is the same pace that is the same.t amazon had a heavy hand.rs. it has bed dictating the

terms and trying to force down the price of electronic books at $9.99 it does not respect publishing is not that simple and will not have a return and customers get used to that and consider every booktv worth $9.99 then you have a tough time selling books that we know cannot sell more than 500 copies, mostly scholarly books, that are likely to fail.ikl for books like that it isant important to come up withnt the price point* that covers the money sunk and into theazon process.'s but what has happened with

apple and barnes &oin noble and independent publishers contributing in a way as well that gets lost. now you have more players who can work with publishers and more competitive ways. somef now, although rarely happens, that was not the casee but now there is enough competitors google is the big reason why. google is not out to cash and on a big way. that is this side project. paroled is magazines over o

time will be beneficial. r and i am happy to seal them deal and and less of the way of publishers. if it was just amazon we would all be in trouble. >> talking about that with microsoft and two areas, met very slowly being encroaches time to those control or are they separating their searches and also not the battle abomey higher education but those windows and a cloud starting with the the to one. >> in terms of competitionted

and bing google had 70% a of search activity. even the new users bing brings in polls from yahoo!so which is actually a partner. it does take some of the search is a way that the ku gold doesn't grow so much in the u.s. but it is more than 90%. in portugal it is more than 96%. but we don't use it as muchve as those who fear it. that is happening.wt there is tremendous growth in the arab nations andere

india were google has managed to come up withi multiple language search angeles station engines. i lose count right now how many. no indian company had the audacity or with the money to sink into that look was dick -- linguistic challenge. so there are a number of home-grown engines that have failed because now not only can google take you through a search in the language of commerce so the growth has beenhe tremendous.at the two places it cannot grow our russia and people's republic of china. and google is not so strong in japan or south korea.or self period the government helped it to invest in a

search engine to specializeing 10 south korean language. so to do these relations is complicated. despite having one of the founders born in russia and there is a strong sense of nationalism so those in russia are having of the relationship between the people's republic of china and a number of searchby engines sponsored released allowed to thrive by the government.o and there's a reason why do google does worse but in the united states i think you will is much more concerned con about facebook three and bing.g.

nobody goes to bing to research climate change.an you go to google.ge, you go to bing to buy shoesa or the airline ticket for you never see a commerciale saying use us to find out about diamonds. they're not interested to grab you that way because it is harder to make money that way. but for that reason to go as adjusting but it was to keep you happy. that is the real competitor. they are afraid four facebook wille leverage all that information about the things and people we love to turn it into the efficient facebook machine.w so far they have not

mastered that which is why our pages look that way mostrn of the time but people are pretty confident facebook will crack the code. >> [inaudible] although the contact is quite prevalent. >> thank you. we appreciate you coming. i will sign books. [applause]