Q: Why is it that you perceived the need for Google before anyone else did?

Larry Page:

We didn't start out to do a search engine at all. Um, in late 1995, I started collecting the links on the web, because my advisor and I decided that would be a good thing to do. We didn't know exactly what I was going to do with it, but it seemed like no one was really looking at the links on the web--which pages link to which pages.

In computer science, there's a lot of big graphs. Right now, the web has like 5 billion edges and, you know, 2 billion nodes. So it is a huge graph. I figured I could get a dissertation and do something fun and perhaps practical at the same time.

Q: Where do you go from here? What do you see yourself doing in 10 or 20 years?

I think Google is great because it's basically artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. So if we had the ultimate search engine, it 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.

Q: Why is it that you perceived the need for Google before anyone else did?

Larry Page:

We didn't start out to do a search engine at all. Um, in late 1995, I started collecting the links on the web, because my advisor and I decided that would be a good thing to do. We didn't know exactly what I was going to do with it, but it seemed like no one was really looking at the links on the web--which pages link to which pages.

In computer science, there's a lot of big graphs. Right now, the web has like 5 billion edges and, you know, 2 billion nodes. So it is a huge graph. I figured I could get a dissertation and do something fun and perhaps practical at the same time.

Q: Where do you go from here? What do you see yourself doing in 10 or 20 years?

I think Google is great because it's basically artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. So if we had the ultimate search engine, it 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.