Ga-ga for Google: users are fans of the company's highly relevant searches. We're fans because Google is a dotcom that's making money - Company Profil

DEPENDING ON HOW HIP TO THE WEB YOU ARE, YOU MAY OR may not have heard of Google. You've likely heard catch phrases like "odd Google," which is commonly used in Web logs and online diaries when visitor stats reveal a person reached a site by typing a laughable combination of words into the search engine. Or perhaps when utilizing Yahoo! to search the Web, you ended up with results "powered by Google."

Whichever way you look at it, the masses are catching on to the buzz, and an increasing number of users--from the 100-plus Internet companies that pay Google Inc. for its search services to journalists scouring the net for extremely specific information--are looking to the Mountain View, California, search engine company for the best results. The exact formula for attaining the best results is a well-guarded secret, but the reasons why Google has not only stayed afloat amid the dotcom dive and current recession, but avoided layoffs to boot are quite obvious.

"Never heard of it!" laughs Ray Sidney, a 32-year-old software engineer who's been employed by Google Inc. for three years in regard to that fateful spring of 2000 when so many Internet companies shut their doors. He believes Google's success in avoiding tragedy is an amalgam comprising an "incredible love of Google out there" and the fact that the company has actually entered the black.
If you ask co-founder and president Sergey Brin about the stunning success of the company he and Larry Page founded in 1998, he'll tell you it's the concept itself. Search is the No. 1-used application on the Web, second only to e-mail in all online activities. Last July, Jupiter Media Metrix reported Google ranked first among "free-standing" search engines like Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves and Go To, and ranks 15th in usage among all Web sites.

"If you look at the history of these companies, all the search engines decided they wanted to be Yahoo! around '96 and '97," says Brin, 28. "They were going to be portals and decided search was not really that important. Our perception was that search was very important, and the quality of results was important to people. That was a hypothesis that [turned] out to be true," says Brin. It was also the goal that brought Brin and co-founder and president Page, 29, together and prompted Internet big guns to back Google when it was still operating out of Brin and Page's Stanford dorm rooms.

DISK ARRAY

At first, Google started as a collaborative graduate-level research project focusing on link analysis in 1996. The long-term goal was to "retrieve relevant information from a massive set of data," not to start a business and become a hot topic in the media and in the technology world.

Deadpan, Brin admits to his and Page's lackadaisical approach to the project. "We were quite lazy about it," he says. "Stanford was pretty comfy. Being a graduate student there, you didn't really get paid well, but you got to spend time with a lot of interesting people. It's a pretty nice place to be, so we weren't really that motivated to run off and start a company."

But after a short time, they were having a lot of success retrieving information and realized the importance of what they were working on. "It got to the point where the easier way to provide it to the world was to start a company," says Brim They were no-frills when it came to equipment: Page's dorm room was their data center and Brin's was the office until they upgraded to a garage. Money, however, wasn't hard to come by.

Their privately owned company has received funding from the likes of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital. In fact, money has flowed since the very beginning. After Brin and Page decided to start the company, they put forth about $20,000 of their own capital to buy disks and computers. "We would've been happy to self-fund [the company], but it just happened to be easier to get a little investment, so we went to people we were close to," says Brin.

Google's initial angel investors included Ram Shriram, then-president of Junglee, which was eventually purchased by Amazon.com; professors from Stanford University; and Andy Bechtolsheirm, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who tried a few queries using Google on a Palo Alto porch one morning and was impressed enough to write a $100,000 check on the spot. The reason Google incorporated when it did was because that check was made out to one Google Inc.

With the myriad of tell-all biographies detailing Internet mavens' rise to glory and movies depicting many a dotcommer's fall from grace, you'd think Google's ride would be a similar whirlwind. Not the case. "I feel bad about even being associated with those kinds of people," says Brin about cutthroat go-getters featured in documentaries like Startup.com. "I think there are a lot of ethical issues there. That company started with, 'There's an Internet boom--why don't we capitalize on it?' In Google's case, we were really interested in developing our search technology. It wasn't a get-rich-quick thing, and it still isn't. We're trying to build better and better products and a stronger and stronger company, but you don't see us running around trying to make a buck by IPO-ing or selling the company."