Toward the end of the tour, Larry led me to a room where a three-dimensional image of the earth rotated on a large flat monitor. Larry asked the young Indian American engineer who was working nearby to explain what we were looking at.
"These lights represent all the searches that are going on right now," the engineer said. "Each colour is a different language...." The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all the boundaries between men- nationality, race, religion, wealth- were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo, the student in a remote Indian village, and the manager of a Mexico City department store were drawn into a single, constant, thrumming conversation, time and space giving way to a world spun entirely of light. Then I noticed the broad swaths of darkness as the globe spun on its axis- most of Africa, chunks of South Asia, even some portions of the United States, where the thick cords of light dissolved into a few discrete strands.
Richard Branson's remark:
I have been asked: "What is the greatest business invention of the last fifty years?" That's a tough question because you need to factor in the mobile phone, DNA testing, the personal computer and the Internet, but I think the winner has to be Google's powerful search engine.
Google has allowed ordinary peope to find things out much more quickly. It has led to more immediate choice- and increased consumer power- and a freer flow of information, knowledge and ideas. It is far more than just a search engine- it has become an engine of change.
Google's History: Two Standford Ph.D candidates in computer science Larry Page and Sergey Brin collaborated in a dorm room to develop a better way to search the web. In 1998 with some million dollars raised they formed Google with three employees operating out of a garage.
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