In front a cup of coffee.

Google is perhaps one of the best examples of how an idea can create a successful project. The engine behind a great many innovations and new attitudes, it has even altered the English language (the verb “to google” for example, now used by web users as a synonym for “search”).
But what is the story behind Google?
Google was created from an intuition born of necessity. The necessity of two postgrad students at Stanford, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who shared courses, digs at university and also the desire to improve what they found online. The idea was to get results from Internet searches, based on quality rather than quantity. At the time (it was 1998-99), the tools available provided users with results based on the number of times the word was repeated, without taking into account the relevance of the content of sites on which the word appeared. To give an extreme example, if you search the word “Nokia”, a page containing a thousand repetitions of the word could appear even before Nokia’s own web page.
Larry and Sergey created what is known as PageRank, which values the role of the online community and determines a page’s visibility in accordance with the number of sites that link up to it. This is still the basic mechanism behind Google, although the engine has evolved a great deal over time.

How much of the initial “home made” content can you maintain in an organisation like Google – which now speaks over a hundred languages – and how far can this concept be considered a stimulus?
Apart from the technological aspect, the true value of the “professionalised” “home made” approach comes from the fact that many people have contributed their own enthusiasm, free of charge, so they could translate the site and browse it, with a certain pride, in their own language. This led to our philosophy of launching products made together with users, without necessarily having a defined local branch with its own offices or staff in each country.

Where is Google’s home? And what about your relations with your neighbours, your competitors?
Everything comes from our lack of interest in getting an immediate profit from our product. What we want to do is see whether it meets the needs of the many people who will actually use it. Internet users have helped to create the Google products; this is a little different from the concept of “home made”, but in an extremely positive sense: we let other people into our home, to work on the same product.
Unlike almost all companies, we don’t launch something because we think it will do well, and measure the sales, download and user data.
We launch a product onto the market during what we call a Beta phase (in other words at 70% – 80% of what we believe to be perfection), we receive feedback from people who use it, criticise it and give us advice, and on the basis of these indications we touch it up and then release the definitive version.
This makes Google everyone’s home, and it is a home with very few doors. For us, users are like friends who help us fix the house.

The freedom of expression offered by the Internet makes everyone something of a creator, author or artist. Is this an opportunity or a critical issue?
The Internet is without doubt an opportunity. An example is that each of us can become an artistic director or producer. With Google, you can load home movies, short films on a non-existent budget or your own music videos filmed in your garage, and become known all over the world by loading them onto a site like YouTube. This means they can be shared, and you can either get financial returns or visibility that will nourish your ego or your wallet.

Blogs are a well-qualified part of this phenomenon; apart from having your own blog, you have also created “Google Italia Blog”.  But why have virtual diaries now become so important?
The blog is a double-sided phenomenon: on the one hand it is a great opportunity, and on the other hand it’s a passing trend.
My past experience has taught me that blogs are just another tool, so they won’t change the current situation, except in a few areas. Recently, however, there has been a little too much talk about them, partly because the consulting world sees them as a business tool.
At a personal level, a blog is useful in many ways – it can be a place for self-analysis, where you can write, let off steam or describe interesting things in places we can’t get to, and maybe new literary talents will be unearthed.  I’d be a little wary of business blogs, because it is not necessarily the right tool for all kinds of businesses. I would suggest that companies who want to say something in the right way open just one; people aren’t stupid and these pages require reflection, a human approach, empathy rather than news, so we can understand the culture behind a brand and perhaps share their ideas. The various fake blogs I see, unsupported by anyone except ghostwriters or promotional campaigns, are useless, but they aren’t a big problem because the online community digs them out and flags them up without too much difficulty. Making a bad impression is the highest risk for a company.