Is Google a monopoly? The story of Sergey and Larry

Larry Page and Sergey Brin never liked hanging with reporters. “Larry can be a very sensitive and good person, but he has major trust issues and few social graces,” a former Google PR person once told me. “Sergey has social graces but doesn’t trust people who he thinks don’t approach his level of intelligence.”

Still, in the fall of 1999 their new communications person urged the Google cofounders to visit the East Coast for a modest press tour. Barely a year old, Google was still under the radar for most people, and few knew its compelling story: Page put the whole World Wide Web on Stanford University servers to divine the perfect result of a search query, and Brin did some mathematical wizardry to fulfill the concept. They tried to sell the technology to one of the big internet portals, but couldn’t get a deal they liked. So they started their own company. It still wasn’t clear where their revenues would come from. They were on record as hating ads, believing that “advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

Steven Levy