Web Search–Google
Source: PBS
Google CEO Eric Schmidt Sits Down For TV Interview With Charlie Rose
In a taped interview, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, sat down with Charlie Rose for a 25-minute one-on-one interview that focused on technology and innovation as much as it did on Google and search/advertising. For the most part, most of what Schmidt had to say people who follow the search industry closely have heard before. That said, here are a few comments from E.S. from the interview. Btw, a podcast of the interview should be available in the next day via iTunes and the video should be for sale (maybe they’ll even make this one a freebie?) via Google Video. We wouldn’t be at all surprised to find the video on YouTube and other user-contributed sites soon. Thanks to TVEyes for helping getting a searchable transcript (mechanically generated) as the program was being broadcast. It’s not an official transcript.

+ On people fearing Google
Schmidt: Our ambition is consistent with our mission, and the mission is all the world’s information. There are many people who are concerned about all the world’s information being generally accessible. There are governments worried about that…many, many people are concerned that broad access could be used for things they disagree with or could be used for bad things. We worry about that. We don’t want people using this for anything but good, but the overwhelming power of Google is that there’s a tremendous access for information. We try very, very hard to be true to our principles which many viewers know the most important thing being we don’t use our business to alter ranking.

Note: None of the major web search engines alter organic results (1-10, 10-20, etc. on a results page) based on business dealings.

+ On joining (or not) the Company
Schmidt: I considered not joining because I thought that no one would click on these ads. Shows you how wrong I was, of course. A few months later we had done a database conversion. I was involved. I was here in New York and one of our customers called. The customer was complaining that they had not gotten their results every day because they were so dependent upon Google advertising to know how their business was going. At 5:00 they needed to know exactly how much money they could make. I understood that advertising is a mission-critical sales function. The light bulb goes off.

+ On Where the Company is Going
Schmidt: Google from my perspective is best understood as a systematic innovation. [Schmidt goes on to talk about Google's 20% time for engineers.] The primary business of the company is search and ads. We decided to spend 70% of our total resources on search and ads, 20% on projects near to that, we call them adjacent projects, and 10% on other…That 10% is important because the smartest people want to come work in a place where if they come up with something in the other category the company will support them…

+ On Competition and Worries
Schmidt: This space is so large that there is room for all of the players that you find and new start-ups. This broad space of information access, advertising, services, video, new distribution markets and so forth is the defining business market of technology for many, many years. I don’t worry. We do not worry that much about the direct competitiveness. We worry about our own rate of innovation. We worry that the models that have gotten us to this point with such great innovation will somehow slow down. We worry about 70-20-10… We worry about continuing the mission of innovation.

+ On Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and “Beating” Google
Schmidt: It takes programmers, not words [ laughter ] but it does….We’ll ignore the words and worry about the programmers…

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