How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing?

...It's important to distinguish between "worry versus harm" when it came to privacy online.

The amazing thing is that we're part of people's daily lives, like brushing their teeth. It's just something they do throughout the day while working, buying things, deciding what to do after work and much more. Google has been accepted as part of people's lives.

We have always tried to concentrate on the long term, and to place bets on technology we believe will have a significant impact over time. It's hard to imagine now, but when we started Google most people thought search was a solved problem and that there was no money to be made apart from some banner advertising. We felt the exact opposite: that search quality was very poor, and that awesome user experiences would clearly make money.

If we were motivated by money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up on a beach.

One of our big goals in search is to make search that really understands exactly what you want, understands everything in the world. As computer scientists, we call that artificial intelligence.

You can try to control people, or you can try to have a system that represents reality. I find that knowing what's really happening is more important than trying to control people.