I had no dreams of such economic success. You should have fun and not be so weighed down by expectations.
— Sergey Brin
Having been trained as a computer scientist in the '90s, everybody knew that AI didn't work. People tried it. They tried neural nets, and none of it worked.
It was the summer of 1998. At that point, we were just scrounging around to find resources; we had stolen these computers from all over the department, sort of.
I wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at such a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have spared Google a tremendous amount of effort.
I feel there's an existential angst among young people. I didn't have that. They see enormous mountains, where I only saw one little hill to climb.
We've seen a massive attack on the freedom of the web. Governments are realizing the power of this medium to organize people and they are trying to clamp down across the world, not just in places like China and North Korea; we're seeing bills in the United States, in Italy, all across the world.
You always hear the phrase, money doesn't buy you happiness. But I always in the back of my mind figured a lot of money will buy you a little bit of happiness. But it's not really true. I got a new car because the old one's lease expired.
We just want to have great people working for us.
Google actually relies on our users to help with our marketing. We have a very high percentage of our users who often tell others about our search engine.
You do see more people that have been freed up over the last couple of hundred years to do work that is more about thinking about or creating things... and I would hope to see that trend continue.
I was interested in data mining, which means analyzing large amounts of data, discovering patterns and trends. At the same time, Larry started downloading the Web, which turns out to be the most interesting data you can possibly mine.
Basically, we convert the entire Web into a big equation, with several hundred million variables, which are the page ranks of all the Web pages, and billions of terms, which are the links. And we're able to solve that equation.
Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice - fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.
When I was growing up, I always knew I'd be in the top of my class in math, and that gave me a lot of self-confidence.
The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation.
Once you go from 10 people to 100, you already don't know who everyone is. So at that stage you might as well keep growing, to get the advantages of scale.
Some say Google is God. Others say Google is Satan. But if they think Google is too powerful, remember that with search engines unlike other companies, all it takes is a single click to go to another search engine.
The revolution in deep nets has been very profound. It definitely surprised me, even though I was sitting right there.
We have tried to define precisely what it means to be a force for good - always do the right, ethical thing. Ultimately, 'Don't be evil' seems the easiest way to summarize it.
If Google Books is successful, others will follow.
But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole.
I would like to see anyone be able to achieve their dreams, and that's what this organization does.
Solving big problems is easier than solving little problems.
We want Google to be the third half of your brain.
Obviously everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as being very innovative, very trusted and ethical and ultimately making a big difference in the world.
