Interview with Page & Brin in Madrid

Also posted (by me) in another forum:

Google.es and Adwords were launched in Madrid last Thursday. Page & Brin made a personal appearance and were interviewed by El País, Spain's best-selling newspaper.

To be honest, the interview wasn't great, just going over aspects of Google and its history that most webmasters know already and Brin seemed to do almost all of the talking. There were, however, one or two interesting comments (paraphrased and translated from Spanish) ...

- (Brin, to the interviewer's comment about Google making all knowledge uniform) Not at all; Google is diversity, difference. It gives the public the the most diverse information in human history.
- (Brin) It was never clear we were going to IPO. The burst of the (dot com) bubble has done us good. We can get better qualified personnel at lower salaries.
- (Brin) AdWords gives prestige to advertising. If an ad is at the top, it not only is paying more but is clearly interesting for the public.
- (Page, regarding Altavista's video and music search) There are copyright problems. If we reproduce a Madonna video we don't have rights to, that's illegal. That's the main problem, the technical one could be solved.
- (Brin) The future is search requests by voice using a mobile phone and results on the phone's screen. We're already testing it.
- (Brin, to a question about if Google could remember a user's search preferences to give better results) That's the future and it will be done. However, there are hundreds of millions of users and thousands of millions of pages. Too many variables.
- (Brin, to a question about what pages will never be found) Pornographic pages (Gringo: huh?); in Germany, nazi pages. Normally we abide by the local legislation of the country involved. We don't censure ourselves.

Gringo.

Interesting stuff!



Was Brin answering a question regarding current or future SERPs Gringo?

Either way, I think it's more likely that they'll incorporate voice activation technology well before they actually eradicate pornography.

Jon

The question was about Google's current state, which is why I can't understand the answer.

Gringo.