Larry Page (right) and Sergey Brin have played by their own rules, be it the unconventional Google IPO or the ultra-cool work culture at Googleplex

One of the first things Google did after it set up its India sales office in Hyderabad in March 2004, was to put an in-house cricket team together. It was an apt message the California-based internet search giant was sending out to its new recruits: Working at Google is fun. After all, Googlers (as Google employees are called) in the Googleplex headquarters are a pampered lot. Free food, free massages and valet services to take care of everything from dog-walking to dry cleaning, are just a few of the perks Google lavishes on its employees, many of them young and unmarried.

Make no mistake, though. Working at Google is serious business. From virtually nothing, the start-up's young founders and now co-Presidents, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have created a company that will pull in about $6 billion (Rs 27,000 crore) in revenues and $2 billion (Rs 9,000 crore) profits for 2005; Google's market value has soared from $80 billion (Rs 3,60,000 crore) to $138 billion (Rs 6,21,000 crore) in just the last six months. The company is already the third most valuable company in the US, and the buzz on Wall Street is that its stock will touch $600 (Rs 27,000), pushing market value to a jaw-dropping $176 billion (Rs 7,92,000 crore)-taking it closer to #2, Wal-Mart ($197 billion or Rs 8,86,500 crore). In fact, if you asked Google watchers what Page and Brin, who first met as computer science (PhD.) students at Stanford, might want to do, they'll tell you that the 30-somethings really want to own the internet-at least, be its biggest information brokers. And that includes India as well.

Looking at Google's Hyderabad office would never give you a sense of the company's unbridled ambition (neither would visiting its India R&D centre in Bangalore help). Located in the Hi-Tech City, Google has an address on the fourth floor of rmz Futura, a state-of-the-art building, which has neighbours such as Dell and Microsoft. The 6,000-feet office, packed with cubicles, is meant to support Google's global advertising clients. The Googlers here, mostly young, arts college graduates, write AdWord copies (the brief descriptive "sponsored links", actually ads, that show up alongside search results). "It really is a mixed bag," says Roy Gilbert, a former sonar officer (and a computer science engineer from the us Naval Academy), who is now Director, Online Sales & Operations, and the first among equals in Google India. (The other two top executives locally are Ashish Kashyap, Country Manager, Sales and Operations, and Kannan Pashupati, who is filling in for Krishna Bharat of Google News fame as head of the Bangalore development centre.)

WHAT GOOGLE IS DOING IN INDIA Research & Development in Bangalore

Google all the way: The development centre in Bangalore Uniqueness: Set up in 2004, Google Bangalore is its first R&D centre outside of the US. It will be a full peer to Google's other engineering facilities in Mountain View, Santa Monica, New York, Zurich and Tokyo Aim: Its charter is to innovate, implement and launch new Google technologies and products to a global audience. Engineering teams in India will define their own projects and work on all aspects of engineering, including research, project conception, implementation and deployment Work: Touches many fundamental areas of computer science, including information retrieval, distributed systems, machine learning, data mining, theoretical computer science, statistics and user interface Techie profile: Hires only outstanding software engineers, top programmers and visionary computer scientists. Hiring standards in India are exactly the same as in the US that include a rigorous, technical interview. (Tip: They are currently looking for talented engineers) Virtual campus: Engineers in Bangalore can relocate to other Google R&D centres worldwide Career growth: Google engineers can rise to senior roles purely based on technical accomplishments; they do not have to get into management to advance their careers

Sales and Marketing in Hyderabad

Reflecting growth: Google office in Hyderabad What it does: Set up in 2004, after the R&D centre, Google Hyderabad services engineering, human resources and online sales functions. It's also considered the largest English AdWords department for Google Uniqueness: It's one of the three offices (besides Mountain View, California, and Dublin, Ireland) serving English language markets Fastest growing: Hyderabad, which staffs between 150 and 200 people and is currently on a hiring spree, is the fastest-growing sales office worldwide Work: Google's AdWords advertisers and AdSense publishers worldwide receive seamless online sales service and support in their local time from the team in Hyderabad No night shift: Hyderabad office is not a BPO and the working hours are strictly between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Employee profile: Hires writers who are very proficient in English for its AdWords department. It has a written test and interview; age no bar

Gilbert wouldn't reveal the headcount at Hyderabad, but BT learns that it could be about 200. But recruitment, which spanned three months and campuses in cities like Coimbatore, is far from over, since sales operations are only just being rolled out. Last month, Google did a soft launch of its AdWords business, but an official launch will happen only in a month or two.

Google's India Plans

Why is India important to Google? The answer to that question lies in Google's business model-the existing one, that is. Have you ever wondered why a free search engine is one of the biggest money-spinners on the internet? It is because Google makes oodles of money selling advertisements to internet users under programmes called AdWords and AdSense (see How Google Makes Money).

But there's a problem with this model in the long term. For Google's revenues to keep growing at the phenomenal pace that they are, either the number of queries or the network will need to keep growing. The day when queries peak is still far off, but Google is already moving to tap growing markets. That apart, it is widening its scope of services by adding things like email, internet telephony, news aggregation, all of which are free at present. But it needs to keep innovating. India, therefore, is important to Google for two reasons: One, it has a vast pool of software talent and, two, just 38.5 million internet users (but growing at a healthy clip of 50 per cent) against a population of 1.1 billion. India is where a lot of Google's innovators and customers will come from in future.

Fielding 90 per cent of a billion queries a month from India, Google is already on top of the search engine heap. Yahoo has less than 10 per cent share, and msn India and others, the minuscule rest. Even in India, "the advertising market is increasingly moving towards search", says Rohit Sharma, Head (Sales & Marketing) Indiatimes, implying that plain vanilla banner or pop-up ads are going out of fashion.

According to eStatsIndia, a Delhi-based internet research consultancy, search accounted for Rs 52 crore of the Rs 120 crore advertisers spent online last year. But here's the interesting bit: Almost all of that money went to Google, although it had almost no sales presence. Advertisers, mainly small, were availing of Google's self-service AdWords scheme to advertise (a minimum of Rs 250 is needed to sign up for the service, and money gets deducted from the account based on the number of clicks). By offering self-service, Google managed to tap small advertisers-like Delhi's Deez Biryani-to whom large media aren't viable. Globally too, a large part of its half-a-million AdWord advertisers are small and medium enterprises.

A former naval engineer, Roy Gilbert heads Google's Hyderabad operations, which support AdWord advertisers Roy Gilbert Director/Online Sales & Operations

Google's plan now is to significantly increase revenues by bringing in some of the bigger advertisers like an ICICI Bank or Citibank through direct selling. Kashyap, poached from Indiatimes, has opened sales offices in Mumbai and Delhi. It's hard to say how much these big companies will end up spending on search, but the trend is gathering momentum. Notes Sanjeev Bikhchandani, CEO, Naukri.com, a relatively big advertiser on Google: "I intend to spend at least 25 per cent of my Rs 15-20 crore advertising budget next year on Google." Last year, Naukri, an online jobs portal, spent Rs 2 crore on AdWords. Kashyap wouldn't reveal his revenue targets.

What Can Trip Google Up?

If you are asking that question today, then nothing. Google is on its way to emerging as one of the top 20 media companies in the us, and everyone from television networks to newspaper and magazine publishers are running scared of Google because of the consumer shift online. Google's $1-billion (Rs 4,500-crore) investment in America Online (AOL) is a classic example. Under the deal, billed a "global online advertising partnership", Google's advertisers will be able to reach some of the most expensive media properties in the US. "A critical piece of this strategic alliance will be our content, which we will be making more accessible to Google users," Time Warner (whose subsidiary AOL is) CEO Dick Parsons said in a release when the deal was announced on December 20 last year. Investors, on their part, expect Google to make so much money that there's talk of the stock hitting $600 from $465 today.

But things need not be so hunky-dory. Google's golden goose is its search engine. It is very much possible that a better search engine comes along-there are several contenders already-and steals the thunder from Google. Sure, Google has its racks and racks of cheap PCs hooked up with proprietary hardware and software that may be hard for a rival to replicate inexpensively. But in this business, one can never rule out a disruptive technology.

Indians at Google: A Key Factor It doesn't employ an army of Indian techies like Microsoft, but Google has its share of them.

Google's Bharat: The man behind Google News Although Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin visited India for the first time in 2004, Indians-two of them in particular-played a crucial role in getting them started up. One was Rajeev Motwani, a computer science professor at Stanford and Brin's PhD. guide, who helped Page with what's at the core of Google's search technology-a PageRank system that helps throw up the most relevant search results. The other Indian was Ram Shriram of Junglee fame (he also worked with Netscape and Amazon), who was an early angel investor in Google. There are others who've contributed to the company's success: Like Krishna Bharat, who developed Google News, and Anurag Acharya of Google Scholar. Google's top management is also sprinkled with some Indians: Sukhinder Singh Cassidy (of Indian origin) is VP, Asia-Pacific and Latin American Operations, and, therefore, India sales team reports to her. Recently appointed, Nikesh Arora is VP, European operations. Prior to joining Google, he was Chief Marketing Officer and a board member at T-Mobile. Deep Nishar, Director, Product Management, is another key Indian at Google. He develops and implements the product strategy for Google's mobile products worldwide. In fact, when Page and Brin visited India, they had only one complaint: That they had come too late.

The eight-year-old company, then, must do two things: One, make sure its search technology remains the best forever and, two, grow new streams of revenue. All work related to the former is a closely-guarded secret, but Google's diversification has of late moved centre stage. Like its announcement at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that it will sell video online, just like Apple sells music via iTunes. Google has been offering video free online for a year now, but this is its first step towards going pay-for-premium content. Google also announced the launch of Google Pack, a bundle of software (including Google Earth, Desktop Search, Adobe Reader 7, and Norton Antivirus) that is aimed at shaking rival Microsoft's foundation, besides making money.

A far more ambitious, and crucial, diversification for Google will be into mobile phones and IPTV, where Google's plans may be to help TV networks deliver more customised ads to viewers by linking their internet queries (remember, Google maintains a database of every search and the IP address from which it originates) to the kind of ads they would be interested in. (Madison Avenue, watch out.) As for mobile business, Google already has a deal with Motorola to put a Google button on its phones for instant web search. Considering that there are 1.5 billion mobile phone connections in the world-70 million in India alone-Google's foray into mobile telephony could pay off handsomely. (Also at the show, Yahoo announced the launch of Yahoo Go, which takes it from the pc to the mobile phone and TV.)

Is Google the Next Evil Empire? Privacy groups in the US are alarmed over some of Google's practices.

At work: An ultra-cool workplace belies Google's sinister image Guess what google's corporate credo is? It's "do no evil". But an increasing number of people, particularly in the US, are beginning to ask if Google is living by that motto. Most concerns revolve around the amount of data that Google amasses. For instance, Google stores information on every single search and can trace it back to individual IP addresses. Email messages on Gmail are scanned for key words to allow for customised advertising. But privacy advocates are more worried about Google's increasing lock on the internet. There are rumours that Google is buying "dark fibre", that is unused optic fibre capacity, to build a US-wide network of pipes that will form its information backbone. Among the theories doing the rounds is one that says Google will use the backbone to ply traffic between its data centres in the US and then use a wireless network to distribute the content locally to end users, thus circumventing telcos. But it's possible that Google is buying the bandwidth for its own use, now that is has gotten into online video in a big way. People are also worried that Google has roped in Craig Venter (who cracked the human genome) to lead its foray into biotechnology. The idea, as revealed by Venter to The Washington Post's David Vise (see Bookend on page 130), is "to generate a gene catalogue to characterise all the genes on the planet and understand their evolutionary development". In other words, Google's ambitions seem unlimited. And that's what is worrying some people.

Yet, since Google is largely an intelligent aggregator with no content of its own, it can run into copyright and trademark issues. In France, Agence France Presse (AFP) sued Google News for using its copyrighted content; in the us, auto insurer Geico sued-and won-Google for trademark infringement (search for Geico threw up ads from competing insurance firms), and Google's plans to digitise millions of books online has also raised the hackles of publishers. There's another threat. As Google ties up with an increasing number of content companies to push revenues, it's possible that the purity of its search results gets contaminated with ads. Disgruntled users could then knock Google off its perch.

At the start of 2006, though, any threat to Google seems distant.