Even though Brin and Page were averse to accepting advertising, Bechtolsheim knew that it would be simple—and not corrupting—to put clearly labeled display ads on the search results page. That meant there was an obvious revenue stream waiting to be tapped. “This is the single best idea I have heard in years,” he told them. They talked about valuation for a minute, and Bechtolsheim said they were setting their price too low. “Well, I don’t want to waste time,” he concluded, since he had to get to work. “I’m sure it’ll help you guys if I just write a check.” He went to the car to get his checkbook and wrote one made out to Google Inc. for $100,000. “We don’t have a bank account yet,” Brin told him. “Deposit it when you get one,” Bechtolsheim replied. Then he rode off in his Porsche.
Brin and Page went to Burger King to celebrate. “We thought we should get something that tasted really good, though it was really unhealthy,” Page said. “And it was cheap. It seemed like the right combination of ways to celebrate the funding.”164
Bechtolsheim’s check made out to Google Inc. provided a spur to get themselves incorporated. “We had to quickly get a lawyer,” Brin said.165 Page recalled, “It was like, wow, maybe we really should start a company now.”166 Because of Bechtolsheim’s reputation—and because of the impressive nature of Google’s product—other funders came in, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. “I just fell in love with Larry and Sergey,” Bezos declared. “They had a vision. It was a customer-focused point of view.”167 The favorable buzz around Google grew so loud that, a few months later, it was able to pull off the rare feat of getting investments from both of the valley’s rival top venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.
Silicon Valley had one other ingredient, in addition to a helpful university and eager mentors and venture capitalists: a lot of garages, like the ones in which Hewlett and Packard designed their first products and Jobs and Wozniak assembled the first Apple I boards. When Page and Brin realized that it was time to put aside plans for dissertations and leave the Stanford nest, they found a garage—a two-car garage, which came with a hot tub and a couple of spare rooms inside the house—that they could rent for $1,700 a month at the Menlo Park house of a Stanford friend, Susan Wojcicki, who soon joined Google. In September 1998, one month after they met with Bechtolsheim, Page and Brin incorporated their company, opened a bank account, and cashed his check. On the wall of the garage they put up a whiteboard emblazoned “Google Worldwide Headquarters.”
In addition to making all of the World Wide Web’s information accessible, Google represented a climactic leap in the relationship between humans and machines—the “man-computer symbiosis” that Licklider had envisioned four decades earlier. Yahoo! had attempted a more primitive version of this symbiosis by using both electronic searches and human-compiled directories. The approach that Page and Brin took might appear, at first glance, to be a way of removing human hands from this formula by having the searches performed by Web crawlers and computer algorithms only. But a deeper look reveals that their approach was in fact a melding of machine and human intelligence. Their algorithm relied on the billions of human judgments made by people when they created links from their own websites. It was an automated way to tap into the wisdom of humans—in other words, a higher form of human-computer symbiosis. “The process might seem completely automated,” Brin explained, “but in terms of how much human input goes into the final product, there are millions of people who spend time designing their webpages, determining who to link to and how, and that human element goes into it.”168
In his seminal 1945 essay “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush had set forth the challenge: “The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.” In the paper they submitted to Stanford just before they left to launch their company, Brin and Page made the same point: “The number of documents in the indices has been increasing by many orders of magnitude, but the user’s ability to look at documents has not.” Their words were less eloquent than Bush’s, but they had succeeded in fulfilling his dream of a human-machine collaboration to deal with information overload. In doing so, Google became the culmination of a sixty-year process to create a world in which humans, computers, and networks were intimately linked. Anyone could share with people anywhere and, as the Victorian-era almanac promised, enquire within upon everything.
I. Like the Web’s HTTP, Gopher was an Internet (TCP/IP) application layer protocol. It primarily facilitated a menu-based navigation for finding and distributing documents (usually text-based) online. The links were done by the servers rather than embedded in the documents. It was named after the university’s mascot and was also a pun on “go for.”
II. A year later, Andreessen would join with the serially successful entrepreneur Jim Clark to launch a company called Netscape that produced a commercial version of the Mosaic browser.
III. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies incorporate mathematically coded encryption techniques and other principles of cryptography to create a secure currency that is not centrally controlled.
IV. In March 2003 blog as both a noun and a verb was admitted into the Oxford English Dictionary.
V. Tellingly, and laudably, Wikipedia’s entries on its own history and the roles of Wales and Sanger have turned out, after much fighting on the discussion boards, to be balanced and objective.
VI. Created by the Byte Shop’s owner Paul Terrell, who had launched the Apple I by ordering the first fifty for his store.
VII. The one written by Bill Gates.
VIII. Gates donated to computer buildings at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon. The one at Harvard, cofunded with Steve Ballmer, was named Maxwell Dworkin, after their mothers.
IX. The Oxford English Dictionary added google as a verb in 2006.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ADA FOREVER
LADY LOVELACE’S OBJECTION
Ada Lovelace would have been pleased. To the extent that we are permitted to surmise the thoughts of someone who’s been dead for more than 150 years, we can imagine her writing a proud letter boasting about her intuition that calculating devices would someday become general-purpose computers, beautiful machines that can not only manipulate numbers but make music and process words and “combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety.”
Machines such as these emerged in the 1950s, and during the subsequent thirty years there were two historic innovations that caused them to revolutionize how we live: microchips allowed computers to become small enough to be personal appliances, and packet-switched networks allowed them to be connected as nodes on a web. This merger of the personal computer and the Internet allowed digital creativity, content sharing, community formation, and social networking to blossom on a mass scale. It made real what Ada called “poetical science,” in which creativity and technology were the warp and woof, like a tapestry from Jacquard’s loom.