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by Sergey Brin

1. How did Google start and how was the architecture of the search engine built?

Google began as a research project at Stanford University in spring 1995. Larry Page and I, both computer science majors with areas of focus in data mining and user interface design, first met at a gathering of Stanford doctoral program candidates. By December 1995, they began developing the search technology that would become the foundation of Google Inc.

Most search engines return results based on how often keywords appear in a website. Google is different. Using a highly sophisticated technology based on a patent-pending PageRank™ technology, Google quickly scans its index and produces highly relevant results to a search query, often in less than half a second. PageRank relies on the democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote, or by Page A for Page B. And Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important weigh more heavily and help to make other pages important.

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing if they don't match a specific query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to a search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for a query.

2. What are the main features Google has? What are the differences with other search engines?

Google offers a variety of options and tools for accessing information on the Internet, including the following:

• Google Web Directory: The Google Web Directory combines Google's sophisticated search technology with the Netscape® Open Directory Project, the leading Internet directory, to create a more comprehensive, relevant, and easy-to-use web search and browsing service.
• Special Searches: Google has created search engines for users who want to find information pertaining to special topics such as the U.S. Government, Linux, Apple Macintosh, BSD, and specific universities around the world. These specialized search engines help narrow a query by searching within only a specific subset of the web.
• The Google Toolbar™: The new Google Toolbar™ is a customizable browser tool plug-in that provides users with the full power of Google's search engine from any web page.
• Google Browser Buttons: Adding Google's Browser Buttons to personal toolbars give users fast access to Google while surfing the web.
• Google on the Go: Google's adaptable search technology can be accessed from any number of devices, such as WAP phones, Palm handheld devices, and Internet appliances.

Our technology is our primary differentiator. Google's scalable architecture was designed to cull the vast amount of information on the Internet and deliver the most relevant results quickly and easily. Google is based on advanced search technology, which was developed at Stanford by Larry Page and I. Since its inception, Google has aggressively evolved and advanced its technology, ensuring that we retain a wide leadership margin in search. We have nearly 200 employees, more than half of whom are engineering/technical professionals. We have more than 30 Ph.D.s on staff, all working on search. And we have a Research Group, which is dedicated to exploring and evaluating search technology a year or so out.

We also take great care with our interactions with our users and customers. Our goal is to provide the best search experience on the World Wide Web. To that end, we've designed an interface that is clean and easy to use. We don't want to distract users from what they come to Google to do - find answers. We have built an architecture that returns highly relevant results in usually less than half a second. And we like to have fun, which we express with our occasional Google Doodles, our small, playful graphics that we put on our home page during certain times of the year.

3. What demographics is Google primarily targeting?

Google targets everyone who uses the World Wide Web as a source of information. Google believes it provides a universal technology that is applicable to all users. However, since currently most of our users have a technology background we are looking to reach to consumers who have little or no Internet experience.

4. Nowadays, there is a lot of talking between search engines and directories. What is the difference between a search engine and a directory?

A web directory allows users to search via categories. For example, although Google has a search box, we also provide the Google Web Directory that combines Google's search technology with the Netscape Open Directory Project to search the Internet organized by topic.

• Google applies PageRank™ technology to rank the sites based on their importance. Horizontal bars, which are displayed next to each web page, indicate the importance of the page.
• Google uses the advanced technology that powers its regular web search to search over all the content of sites within a category, not just the titles and descriptions. This capability enables users to search deeper within categories and produces more relevant results than any other directory search.

Google's classification technique connects regular Google search results with information in the Google Web Directory. This technology gives users one-click access from regular Google search results to the most relevant hand-selected web pages in the Google directory.

5. How is the indexing function performed at Google?

Google uses a software robot called Googlebot to identify and evaluate more than a billion pages of content on the web, making it the world's most comprehensive search engine. Google's proprietary technology relies on PageRank(TM) to determine the relative importance of each page Google crawls on the web. Among the characteristics PageRank evaluates are the text included in the links to a site, the text on each page and the PageRank of the sites linking to the site being evaluated. This automated process allows Google to objectively determine which pages other websites deem important.

6. What plays the key role when you look for a company in Google? Meta tags?

How can other sites improve placement on the search engine? Before the web, the state-of-the-art search ranking technique was to look at the user query, look at a document, and basically count how often the query words occurred in the document. Really, there was not much other information to go on.

But web pages have all sorts of additional information: bolding, headers, anchors, font size changes. Google uses this information to help rank a page. For instance, if the word you're looking for occurs in the title of a document, that document will score higher than if it occurs in a tiny font in the copyright notice.

In addition to looking at the text on a page, we look at the text of people who point to a page. For example, if lots of people have links to the Nike homepage that says "sneakers," then this makes the Nike page a better match for the query "sneakers", even if the word "sneakers" doesn't occur anywhere on the Nike homepage.

7. Nowadays, most companies' concern is placement of a site in a search engine. How can a web site's ranking be improved?

Google believes in providing objective and unbiased results. Again, the site needs to have a high PageRank in order to achieve highest results. There are no paid-for-placement results.

8. We have seen Google translated and localized in multiple languages. How did Google implement the translation process of the search engine?

Google started its translation process by using translation vendors specializing in multiple languages, however this proved difficult; the tech-savvy, friendly Google tone was challenging to translate and it required direct communication with the translators. In addition, we wanted to make Google accessible in many languages and we wanted to do this quickly. We also wanted the quality to be high. To achieve these goals, we have moved to contracting with individual translators specializing in a given language.

9. When launching a new country site, does your in-country office provide the translation or do you outsource translation to a vendor?

Google does not have in-country offices yet, so we currently outsource our translation service. However, the Google staff consists of employees from a variety of countries. We believe that our diverse workforce puts us in a position to quickly evaluate the quality of an outsourced translation for many of the languages we support.

10. In what ways have you been able to automate the web translation process?

Google started by working on setting up an easy way for translators to test their translations in context on the site, but that did not solve the overhead of getting the content to the various translators and back (the logistics of this are much more of an issue when you're working with individual translators for different languages). To facilitate and automate this part of the process, we're moving to a 'self-service' translation application that we have developed in-house. Our current translators will be able to log in to the console, see the latest new content to be translated, make corrections to existing translations, etc. We are also planning on allowing people who want to translate part of the site into a given language that we don't currently support to do that -- which should allow us to rapidly provide new native interfaces that we do not support today.

11. To what extent does Google localize the content of its multilingual site (i.e., country-specific content that may be different from what is on the corresponding English site)?

In addition to Google's clean, user friendly interface, we also implement localized features with supporting content within each country. Just recently, February 27, Google announced its support of its new wireless search technology specifically designed for users of NTT DoCoMo i-mode mobile phones in Japan. Available now at http://www.google.com/imode, Google's i-mode search service is the first search engine that enables access to the entire World Wide Web from any i-mode mobile phone. Users can now search and browse more than 1.3 billion Internet web pages. When a wireless user requests a traditional HTML page, Google's technology automatically quickly translates the requested HTML document into a format optimized for I-mode wireless phones.

12. Do your translators work directly in HTML files? How do you verify the accuracy of the translations produced?

It depends, but often, yes. Google conducts a local review with native speakers. If we make a mistake, we also get feedback from native-speaking users.

13. Who engineers and builds the translated site?

This work is all currently done at Google.

14. Describe your process for QA testing of Google´s multilingual sites.

For interfaces, it requires the following: - review by native-speaking Googlers.

We also leverage native-speaking friends/family. - we also recruit native-speakers to review and test the multilingual sites.

15. How many foreign-languages do you currently support on your web site? What languages get more hits?

Google currently supports a native interface in 14 languages (in addition to English). Also, Google currently supports search in 25 languages (in addition to English). German and Japanese currently get the most page views.

Sergey Brin, Google's Co-Founder & President
Sergey Brin, 27, a native of Moscow, graduated with honors with a bachelor of science degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park. He is currently on leave from the Ph.D. program in computer science at Stanford University, where he received his master's degree. Brin is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.

Brin founded Google Inc. in 1998 with Larry Page.

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