The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.
Eric Schmidt
Facial recognition, completely unmonitored, can be used for very bad things. It can be used for stalking, for example.
The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists.
The characteristic of great innovators and great companies is they see a space that others do not. They don't just listen to what people tell them; they actually invent something new, something that you didn't know you needed, but the moment you see it, you say, 'I must have it.'
The rise of Google, the rise of Facebook, the rise of Apple, I think are proof that there is a place for computer science as something that solves problems that people face every day.
Your car should drive itself. It's amazing to me that we let humans drive cars... It's a bug that cars were invented before computers.
I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.
If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
Fast learners win.
I think of Google as a set of overlapping things. It's a consumer platform, consumer phenomenon of which search is its fundamental activity, but there are many other things you can do than search... I think of Google as an advertising company who services the broader advertising industry in the ways that you know.
When you use Google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that's a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant.
If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it's all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It's had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we're much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example.
The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy. And that's really an FCC issue, not a Google issue.
The more broadband we can get globally, the better. It's better for the world; it's better for our advertisers; it's better for Google.
There is a science to managing high tech businesses, and it needs to be respected. One of them is that in technology businesses, leadership is temporary. It's constantly recycling. So the asset has limited lifetime.
When the Internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world.
I used to say that you'll have 10 IP address on your body... and it looks like that's going to happen through medical monitoring.
Silicon Valley's involvement with Washington dates from one event, which was John Scully - who was the CEO of Apple - had dinner with President Clinton and Vice President Gore in 1993. And we're all going, like, 'What's going on? Why would we have dinner with the president?'
We know that Google Earth and Google Maps have had a tremendous impact on Google traffic, users, brand, adoption, and advertisers. We also know Google News, for example, which we don't monetize, has had a tremendous impact on searches and on query quality. We know those people search more. Because we've measured it.
If you think about YouTube, YouTube is a 'searching the world's videos' problem, right? They all have to be there, but how do you find them? What I guess I'm trying to say is that search is still the killer app.
I think it's pretty clear that the Internet as a whole has not had a strong notion of identity. And identity means, 'Who am I?' Fundamentally, what Facebook has done has built a way to figure out who people are.
Google is very much a not-invented-here, build-it-ourselves culture.
Google docs and spreadsheets don't work if you're on an airplane. But it's a technical problem that is going to get solved. Eventually you will be able to work on a plane as if you are connected and, then when you get reconnected to the Internet, your computer will just synchronize with the cloud.
We want to make sure the thing you're looking for is on Google 100 percent of the time.
Amazon has well passed any expectations of its ability to change distribution and marketing.
People assume that computers will do everything that humans do. Not good. People are different from each other and they are all really different from computers.
Remember, when you go to YouTube, you do a search. When you go to Google, you do a search. As we get the search integrated between YouTube and Google, which we're working on, it will drive a lot of traffic into both places. So the trick, overall, is generating more searches, more uses of Google.
Washington - having spent a lot of time there, I grew up there and have spent a lot of time there recently - is largely defined by detailed analytical views and policy choices that are not very good. You know, each policy choice has a winner and a loser, right? Somebody's ox is getting gored.
In our case, we focus on quality, and we have a very simple model. If we show fewer ads that are more targeted, those ads are worth more. So we're in this strange situation where we show a smaller number of ads and we make more money because we show better ads. And that's the secret of Google.
There's nothing that cannot be found through some search engine or on the Internet somewhere.
You have to fight for your privacy or you lose it.
The funny thing about advertising is that it's not a zero-sum game... Historically, in the digital ad world, pie has gotten larger and it's possible for everyone to win, and it's perfectly possible that will continue to be true for quite some time.
The coach doesn't have to play the sport as well as you do. They have to watch you and get you to be your best.
In whatever number of years I have on Earth, I think that promoting the values of free expression, the openness of the Internet, that's the best use of my time.
Countries that have the Internet already are not going to turn it off. And so the power of freedom, the power of ideas will spread, and it will change those societies in very dramatic ways.
People are good at intuition, living our lives. What are computers good at? Memory.
The core problem is that the world is full of people who would like to take 99 per cent of the information that's on the Internet, and eliminate 1 per cent. Everyone has their own thing they don't like.
People are surprised to find out that an awful lot of people think that they're idiots.
One of the unintended negative consequences of online advertising has been the loss of value in traditional classifieds. It's simply quicker, simply easier for an end user who's online, on a broadband connection, to look things up and to figure out what they want to buy.
And the more broadband we can get globally, the better. It's better for the world; it's better for our advertisers; it's better for Google.
Google was founded to get information to everybody. A by-product of that strategy is that we invented an advertising business which has provided great economics that allows us to build the servers, hire the employees, create value.
I think I could argue that the press has more impact on politics than corporations.
I had a rule that I had to go to bed before the sun came up. So I used to look up the sunrise times because I thought it would be bad karma to be going to bed as dawn was arriving.
We weren't here to hope and hang on. We wanted to win.
I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time.
I think to some degree one of the strengths of the high tech industry is that people are actually willing to tell you things. When I went to Novell, I didn't know how to be a CEO, so I went in and I called all sorts of CEOs I knew. I called in a favor. I wanted to come by and listen to them tell me what it's like to be a CEO.
I do want to emphasize that we've seen an explosion in the use of Google Maps and Google Earth for education. The earth is a special place. It is our home and it's why we're all here. And the ability to see what's really going on the earth, the good stuff and the bad stuff, at the level that you can, is phenomenal.
The Internet is really about highly specialized information, highly specialized targeting.
Half of Google's revenue comes from selling text-based ads that are placed near search results and are related to the topic of the search. Another half of its revenues come from licensing its search technology to companies like Yahoo.
The thing that people seem to miss about not just Google, but also our competitors, Yahoo, eBay and so forth, is that there's an awful lot of communities that have never been served by traditional media.
