Great Throughts Treasury

"Having a healthy disregard for the impossible."

"Basically, our goal is to organize the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful. "

"The dream as conceived 25 years ago has not been achieved. Until software becomes the ultimate tool for collaboration, productivity, and efficiency, the work is not done. And there's nothing more fun than doing that work."

"Always deliver more than expected."

"Almost everyone who has had an idea that's somewhat revolutionary or wildly successful was first told they're insane."

"Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. So we have the ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the Web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. That?s obviously artificial intelligence, to be able to answer any question, basically, because almost everything is on the Web, right? We?re nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on. And that?s tremendously interesting from an intellectual standpoint."

"As a society, on the larger questions we have, we're not making reasonable progress."

"Big companies have always needed and cooperated in areas where it made sense."

"Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting."

"Because of our employee talent, Google is doing exciting work in nearly every area of computer science. Our main benefit is a workplace with important projects, where employees can contribute and grow."

"By always placing the interests of the user first, Google has built the most loyal audience on the web. And that growth has come not through TV ad campaigns, but through word of mouth from one satisfied user to another."

"From its inception, Google has focused on providing the best user experience possible. While many companies claim to put their customers first, few are able to resist the temptation to make small sacrifices to increase shareholder value. Google has steadfastly refused to make any change that does not offer a benefit to the users who come to the site."

"Google is organized around the ability to attract and leverage the talent of exceptional technologists and business people. We have been lucky to recruit many creative, principled and hard-working stars. We hope to recruit many more in the future. We will reward and treat them well."

"I didn?t start out building a search engine. I just said, ?Oh, the links on the Web are probably interesting. Why don?t we try doing something with that?? I was pretty lucky that it was a useful thing to do."

"I have a simple algorithm, which is, wherever you see paid researchers instead of grad students, that's not where you want to be doing research."

"I can't really comment on rumors."

"I have over 2 million followers now on Google Plus."

"I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What's the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world."

"I don't think we're going to run out of important things to do, compared with the resources that we have. There are many, many problems in the world that need solving."

"I think part of the reason we're successful so far is that originally we didn't really want to start a business."

"I would rather have people think we're confused than let our competitors know what we're going to do."

"I like the fact that I can meet anyone now and have a conversation."

"I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. In fact, there are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name."

"If we are not trusted, we have no business. We have such a lot to lose; we are forced to act in everyone?s interest.?"

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

"If you ask an economist what's driven economic growth, it's been major advances in things that mattered - the mechanization of farming, mass manufacturing, things like that. The problem is, our society is not organized around doing that."

"If you can run the company a bit more collaboratively, you get a better result, because you have more bandwidth and checking and balancing going on."

"If you have a product that's really gaining a lot of usage, then it's probably a good idea."

"If you have a great product that meets people?s needs, they start telling their friends, especially when it?s a search engine, which is something that everybody has to use. So we?ve actually been growing 20 per cent per month, compounded, for our whole history, and without spending any significant money on advertising. It?s an incredible phenomenon."

"If you say you want to automate cars and save people's lives, the skills you need for that aren't taught in any particular discipline. I know - I was interested in working on automating cars when I was a Ph.D. student in 1995."

"In the same way Google puts users first when it comes to our online service, Google Inc. puts employees first when it comes to daily life in our Googleplex headquarters."

"If you're changing the world, you're working on important things. You're excited to get up in the morning."

"Invariably we try 10 things that don?t quite work out in order to do one thing that?s successful. And we learn a lot in doing the 10 things that didn?t quite work."

"It is a tremendous responsibility for us to have all eyes focused on what we do and to give people exactly what they need when they ask for it."

"It definitely helps to be really focused on what you are doing."

"If your access to health care involves your leaving work and driving somewhere and parking and waiting for a long time, that's not going to promote healthiness."

"Many companies have suffered from unreasonable speculation, small initial share float, and boom-bust cycles that hurt them and their investors in the long run. We believe that an auction-based IPO will minimize these problems."

"Many leaders of big organizations, I think, don't believe that change is possible. But if you look at history, things do change, and if your business is static, you're likely to have issues."

"Most portals show their own content above content elsewhere on the web. We feel that's a conflict of interest, analogous to taking money for search results. Their search engine doesn't necessarily provide the best results; it provides the portal's results. Google conscientiously tries to stay away from that. We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible. It's a very different model."

"It is an advantage being young. You don?t have as many other responsibilities."

"It really matters whether people are working on generating clean energy or improving transportation or making the Internet work better and all those things. And small groups of people can have a really huge impact."

"It's hard to keep things moving. And that's always a big trick. I think for me, the key is setting really big goals. And, you know, with YouTube, I think we've had tremendous leadership, both with the founders and now with Salar, who's been running it."

"It's important that the company be a family, that people feel that they're part of the company, and that the company is like a family to them. When you treat people that way, you get better productivity."

"It's quite complicated and sounds circular, but we've worked out a way of calculate a Web site's importance."

"Latin America is one of the fastest growing Internet communities in the world."

"Many companies are under pressure to keep their earnings in line with analysts? forecasts. Therefore, they often accept smaller, predictable earnings rather than larger and less predictable returns. Sergey and I feel this is harmful, and we intend to steer in the opposite direction."

"My job as a leader is to make sure everybody in the company has great opportunities, and that they feel they're having a meaningful impact and are contributing to the good of society. As a world, we're doing a better job of that. My goal is for Google to lead, not follow that."

"My experience is that when people are trying to do ambitious things, they?re all worried about failing when they start. But all sorts of interesting things spin out that are of huge economic value. Also, in these kinds of projects, you get to work with the best people and have a very interesting time. They?re not really taking a risk, but they feel like they are."

"Our company relies on having the trust of our users and using that information for their benefit. That?s a very strong motivation for us. We?re committed to that. If you start to mandate how products are designed, I think that?s a really bad path to follow. I think instead we should have laws that protect the privacy of data, for example, from government requests and other kinds of requests."

"My grandfather was an autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company that he would carry to work. It's a big iron pipe with a hunk of lead on the head. I think about how far we've come as companies from those days, where workers had to protect themselves from the company."