The masters of the online universe
They are the masters of the online universe - the wealthiest, most powerful and influential duo in the internet business. But Google's two founders do seem a tad on the lugubrious side.
Sergey Brin, 33, and Larry Page, 34, both put in appearances this week during a media day at the "Googleplex" - the company's sprawling campus in the affluent Silicon Valley town of Mountain View.
Brin dressed down for the occasion - he turned up wild-haired, straight off his bicycle in a sweaty red sports top and a disconcertingly tight pair of black cycling trousers.
But during a question and answer session, he was immediately on guard when a female reporter congratulated him on his recent nuptials on an off-shore sandbar in the Bahamas – which, until recently, were a closely guarded secret.
"First of all, I'd like to say 'mazel tov' to Sergey on his recent wedding to Anne," the reporter chirped cheerfully.
An awkward pause ensued before Brin, without cracking a smile, replied: "Let's just stick to questions about search."
Clearly, you don't need to act like a chat-show host to build the world's most successful internet enterprise.
Brin and Page made their fortunes, which presently stand at about $16bn each, by spending endless hours slumped in front of computer screens, perfecting complex algorithms for online searches.
Over lunch in the staff canteen (an impressive spread including seared rabbit), Page wandered in and sat down at a table with Google footsoldiers and a few reporters. Picking disinterestedly at his food, he looked like a man who hadn't slept for days and his repartee was, shall we say, monosyllabic.
How much time, I asked, did he think it would take for Google to fine tune its much vaunted new "universal search" which ranks video results in among blogs, books and text?
Page looked at me in between fork-fulls with an expression of baffled incomprehension.
"Infinite," he replied, declining to elaborate. Perhaps it was a stupid question.
He was similarly tight-lipped, though, to other enquiries, becoming briefly animated only when he accidentally dropped his cellphone on the floor.
The Google story is a familiar Silicon Valley tale - the company originated in 1998 as a research project established by Brin and Page during their student days at Stanford University.
The company's technical director, Craig Silverstein, offered some poignant recollections about being the first paid employee. Space was limited, he recounted: Brin's dorm room was the business centre used for programming and phone calls. The nascent enterprise used Page's room as a machine space for its increasingly large collection of computers and servers.
"That worked until Larry's room-mate came back and complained that the big computers were keeping him awake," Silverstein recalled.
In June 2000, they hit the big time by completing "giga Google" - a project to accumulate a search "crawl" of more than a billion pages. Silverstein recounts: "We celebrated with a McDonald's."
Today, Google has just over 12,200 staff. With annual revenue of $10.6bn, that means the average income per employee is almost $1m.
Google is arguably the hottest company in the world - and its sheer clout extends to political circles. The firm recently extended invitations to all candidates for the 2008 presidential elections to address its staff. So far, three have made the trip to Mountain View - Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Bill Richardson. Not bad for a company with a workforce barely above the capacity of a New Hampshire town hall meeting.
Richardson, incidentally, didn't do too well. The New Mexico governor failed to mug up on Google-ology and spoke on tax breaks to encourage companies to harness solar energy - something which, employees pointed out, Google was already doing without fiscal incentives. He also irritated communications chief Elliot Schrage by looking around and suggesting Google didn't seem to have many Latino staff.
"Of course we do," snapped Schrage, who was hosting the speaker meeting.
Although Google has branched into ventures such as office applications and radio, its internet search offering remains its core mission.
At regular sessions, volunteers come into perform searches under close scientific observation. The company even rigs up "eye print" cameras to analyse where these guinea pigs' glance falls on each page. The typical "eye print" is an F shape in the top left corner of the screen, as users read the first couple of results fully before glancing briefly at those lower down.
Google points out that it constantly refines its search page. Recent features include automatic maps which pop up for any query about a specific business - or an instant weather forecast offered for any search term relating to climatic conditions. Then there are subtleties - such as Google's ability to correct users' spelling or to suggest alternative search terms.
Kerry Rodden, a Scottish-born Cambridge graduate who runs Google's "usability" unit aimed at making the search engine constantly easier to use, laments that these gradual improvements create a "loop of laziness" as people barely notice changes and assume that Google will correct their syntax mistakes.
"When I tell my friends I work on the usability of the search page, they say 'that page never changes - what do you do all day?'" she complains.
Google offers a simple example on how the net has changed the world. A person wanting to test their typing speed might tap "typing words per minutes test" into Google and will be directed to an array of pages offering instant on-line assessments. Within minutes, they will get an approximate speed.
A decade ago, testing typing speed would probably have involved buying a special piece of software. Two decades ago, it would have meant going through the Yellow Pages, finding a testing centre and making an appointment - taking, all told, perhaps a week.
On the shady, tree-lined streets of Mountain View, there are black Google sweatshirts everywhere. The town's main drag, Castro Street, is alive with upmarket eateries, bookshops and bars. Google has gone from a dormroom to giga and to global. This Silicon Valley town can justifiably claim to be the epicentre of the internet.