After lunch on friday, there was a surprise session. John Battelle announced that he was going to have a conversation with Sergey Brin. Throughtout the interview Sergey came off as very affable and it's easy to see how he can tell his employees that their corporate motto is "Do No Evil" without them questioning its naiveté.  

John Battelle started off by asking "It's been a long strange trip to where you are today, how's your head?". Sergey responded that they were very fortunate to have started at Stanford. Being in Silicon valley turned out to be very helpful and influential to the course his life has taken today. When he and Larry first started Google they had planned to open source the Google code. The main reason they decided to start a company was because they needed money to purchase the significant computing resources that the Google search engine needed.

John Battelle then asked Sergey to respond to Terry Semel's comments from the previous day that Google is an extraordinary search engine but as a portal they probably rank as number 4. Sergey responded by jokingly stating that although their cafeteria is nice and they keep trying to improve the quality of the food, they aren't in the top 10 or top 100 restuarants in the world. This elicited loud laughter from the audience.

John followed up by asking Sergey what he thought of the comments by Yusuf Mehdi of Microsoft that they are now the underdog.  Sergey replied that he is very excited that Google is considered a leader in terms of technology. He knows they may not be number 1 when it comes to big business deals or creating huge platforms like Microsoft but they are definitely a technology leader.

John then asked Sergey whether he felt any pressure due to their high share of the Web search market and high stock market valuation. Sergey said he wasn't a valuation expert so he couldn't comment on that. As for high market share in the search market, he is glad that so many people use their search engine based on word of mouth. It shows they have built a quality product. They have some promotional partnerships but for the most part their market share has grown due to the great search experience they provide.

The next question from John was whether Google would keep the clean look on their search page. The response from Sergey was that they will continue with that look on their front page but there will arise the need for other kinds of products from Google. For example, GMail arose out of the need for a better user experience around Web mail. Not only have they improved the web mail experience for GMail users but they have also bettered the lot of users of competing services since competitive responses have increased the mail quota size on various services by 100 times or more.

John began his next question by bringing up a topic that had been an undercurrent in various conversations at the conference. Google has become the new Microsoft, in that they are the 800 lb. gorilla that enters markets and takes them over from existing players. John gave the specific example that the newly launched Google Reader has now scared vendors of web-based RSS readers. Sergey responded by pointing out that when Google enters markets it usually leads to good things for existing parties in the market because small companies get bought and new companies get funded. He used GMail as an example of the entrance of Google into a market leading to a flurry of positive M&A activity. Secondly, Sergey stated that some of their offerings are intended to benefit the Web at large. He said they created AdSense as a way for Web publishers to make money and stay in business. Google had become concerned that a lot of web publishers were going out of business which meant less content on the Web which was bad for their search engine.

The questions from John Battelle ended and a Q&A session with the audience began.

The first question asked was about the rumored office suite being developed by Google. Just like Ray Ozzie and Jonathan Schwartz had done when asked the question, Sergey said he didn't think that it made sense to simply port outdated ideas like the mini-computer to the Web. The audience laughed at the comparison of Microsoft Office to the mini-computer. Sergey did say that Google would likely be creating new kinds of applications that solved similar problems to what people currently use traditional Office suites to solve.

The next question from a member of the audience was whether Sergey thought that click fraud was a big problem for Google. Sergey felt that click feaud wasn't a big problem for Google. He said that like credit card companies they have lots of anti-fraud protections. Additionally their customers calculate their ROI on using Google's services and know they get value. Finally, he added that the algorithms that power their advertising engine are fairly complex and not easy to game.

Continuing with the "Google as the new Microsoft" meme, the next question from a member of the audience was what markets did Google not plan to enter in the near future so VCs could tell where was safe to invest. Sergey joked that he thought the various markets entered were good investments. His serious response was that Google is a very bottom up company, and their engineers usually end up deciding what becomes products instead of directives from the executives. John Battelle then jumped in and asked if the company wasn't being directed in its recent offerings then how come most of the offerings seem to be echoing the offerings found in traditional portal sites. Sergey's response was that it was probably because Google's engineers wanted to build better products than the existing offerings in the market place.

I asked Sergey that given Terry Semel's comments that search only accounts for about 5% of page views on the Web while content consumption/creation and communications applications made up 40% of user page views each, what was Google's vision for communications and content related applications. Sergey said that Google definitely plans to improve the parts of the Web where people spend a lot of their time which is part of the motivation for them shipping GMail.