Less than a decade ago, Internet search was a backwater idea deemed not very interesting and certainly not very profitable. Internet companies were at that time directing their energy into developing feature-laden "portals." Then came Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Stanford Ph.D. students who founded Google Inc. in California's Silicon Valley. In six short years, two Stanford grad students turned a simple idea into a multibillion-dollar phenomenon.

Every minute, worldwide, in 90 languages, the index of this Internet-based search engine is probed more than 138,000 times. In the course of a day, that's over 200 million searches of 6 billion Web pages, images and discussion-group postings. Searches for golf clubs, song lyrics, tomorrow night's blind date, recipes and nearly everything else. Amazingly, the majority of those queries evoke satisfactory, even revelatory, results. Google has changed the way the world finds things out, and enticed it to look for things previously considered unfindable.

Google is expected to revolutionize advertising around its proprietary searching capabilities, and approximately 150,000 advertisers are already on board. With the Google system, advertisers only pay when a user clicks on an ad. Ads are usually mere text displayed in response to the words a Google user types into the search box, and advertisers bid for the rights to have their message associated with a given search "keyword." Paying more per keyword increases the likelihood that one's ad will appear near the top of the list of ads that accompanies a search. The result? Consumers see only those products that are associated with their searching interests.

For advertisers constantly on the lookout for ways to reach the right customers at the right time with the right product, Google seems to be the Holy Grail. And while no one can entirely predict the future of advertising, it seems almost certain that Google is destined to lead the way there.

(May, 2004)