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Sergey Brin & Larry Page
Co-founders, Google.com
Occasionally, a web application so useful, so simple and so obvious will come along that it can make the tortured internet user, drowning in a morass of dross searching for those rare pearls (or what you were actually looking for), almost cry with joy.
In the brief history of the web, three sites stand saliently above all others in this respect: Yahoo!, the original, and best, human-run internet directory; Napster, still the easiest and fastest way to search for MP3s, and Google, the best computer indexed search engine, acknowledged to be the fastest and easiest way to search the Internet.
Winners of two Webby awards amongst a trophy-room full of accolades, the two Ph.D. students that founded Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are the latest recipients of the lightning strike of Dot Com fame, fortune and cool.
However, the Internet age does not allow the young Turks heading the Dot Com revolution to rest on their laurels, as the recent tech stock downturn demonstrated; with the "Next Big Thing" always around the corner, Page and Brin know Google will die if it stands still. Thus, Google continues to hunt down new localities where their site can be applied: its international presence is strong, with half of Google's hits coming from outside the U.S.
The big question for Brin and Page is how Google will adapt to a more mature, advanced Internet age. The awaited explosion of broadband access prospectively makes fast loading sites such as Google less necessary, whilst the proliferation of wireless internet access methods presents a peculiarly difficult technical challenge. Along with this, millions now use dedicated programs to search for specific types of information or file, by using peer-to-peer applications such as Napster. Is Google's generalised approached to indexing the web viable in the future?
In their speech to the Club, Google co-founders Page and Brin address these issues, and more. Quite simply, their central and not inconsiderable challenge is to predict how the internet age will mature, and analyse how Google can adapt to this in order to continue its rich vein of success.
Introduction by Tom Dunmore
