Let me tell you. Welcome to 60 minutes on cnbc. Im lesley stahl. The Information Technology revolution changes our world on a daily basis, but one thing that doesnt change is our fascination with the socalled nerds who not only transformed society but became billionaires in the process. This Edition Features a trio of these tech titans bill gates, the man who created the worlds most valuable software company, microsoft; Mark Zuckerberg, the young, geeky Computer Programmer behind the internet phenomenon facebook; and sergey brin, the cofounder of google. Well begin with brin. Has there ever been a brand name like google . In less than five years, it went from an idea to a global verb, as in, i googled this, or, i google that, or, i google you. Back in 2006, shortly after the company went public, google opened its doors for the first time and let us google them. We have north america. Oh, look at that. Google cofounder sergey brin is showing us an electronic globe that displays the mountains of google searches happening around the world at any given moment. So every little dot represents a certain number of searches, but you can see that there are thousands of searches going on every second. Looking at the googleplex, Company Headquarters in Silicon Valley, its hard to imagine that just a few years ago the company basically consisted of the russianborn brin and cofounder larry page working in a converted garage. Our boardroom table was also our pingpong table, so it had the net and everything. Inside the googleplex feels more like a college dorm than a Corporate Office bikes in the hallways, dogs under the desks, and theres a strong spirit of play. Besides all the pingpong, theres a volleyball game every day at noon. This is really where we spend, you know, the overwhelming majority of our time, and so in order to have a good lifestyle, we had to have a good lifestyle at work, which meant that, you know, you do have lots of sports and things. We have our ski trip. How many people work here . Its approaching 3,000. Something like 1,000 became millionaires when the stock went public, and brin and page barely into their 30sare worth about 6 billion each. Okay, so, now, which camera should we buy . [laughter] but they are doing everything they can to keep the money from becoming a distraction. Brin treated the day the company went public as just another workday. And everybody was focused on their projects. One of the engineers i talked to, and i asked him what his plans were. He said he was gonna throw out all of his socks and buy news ones so they would all match. Theyd all be the same kind. So that is the kind of extravagance that were seeing here. John battelle is an author and entrepreneur whos been following companies in Silicon Valley for 20 years. Google has a brand image to maintain, and their image is, is theyre all about innovation. Theyre all about the internet. Theyre all about trust. Theyre not about selling out. Theyre not about getting rich quick. And so youve got a culture like that. I think if anyone were to buy, you know, a new mercedes convertible and drive around with the stereo blaring and, you know, miss work a couple days because theyre rich now, that would not be acceptable behavior at google. Peer pressure. Yeah, so the peer pressures kicked in, but trust me, theres a mercedes convertible in every one of their heads. There is, and it will come out. Over time, it will come out. As if to prove theyre not being distracted by the money, google has been on a tear in the months since going public with what seems to be a new product announced every week google print to make millions of books searchable online, including collections at harvard, oxford, and other leading libraries; google desktop, which lets you search your own computers hard drive; and another new edition called keyhole. Its satellite imagery, so its basically photography of the world taken from above. Google executive marissa mayeryeah, most of them are this youngshowed us how keyhole can find an aerial photo of almost any address. So if i search for amphitheatre parkway, which is our address here, you can see it starts to do this nice zoom in. The googleplex, here we come. Ooh, look at that. Oh, that is cool. And were somewhere right in here. Somewhere in here, more new ideas are being hatched. Googles style is to race them out in beta form that means not finished yet and let users play with them for free and make suggestions. Actually, almost everything on googles home page is free. No one pays to search. So we can search for Something Like flowers. Oh, flowers is wonderful. So people always ask us how google makes money, and you can see here are the ten objective results. On the left side of the screen, you get the top ten websites google found related to flowers. Well, we also have what we called sponsored links. Now, these are these ads over here, and you just clicked on one of the ads. Thats right. This is how google makes money. This is how google makes money. When she clicked on that ad for ftd, ftd paid google. Its a revolutionary idea advertising to an audience of one and one whos already looking for what you want to sell. The rates are so lowtypically between 5ยข and 50 per click that almost anyone can afford to advertise, from the Biggest Company to the smallest momandpop. Eric schmidt, googles ceo, who brin and page hired in 2001 to be the resident grownup, says that the pool of potential advertisers is almost limitless. And theres a lot of evidence that the companies of which google is a member are enabling a new kind of commerce between very small communitiespeople who can find each otherfor whom the traditional advertising mechanisms, whether its Television Advertising or radio, do not serve. The Business World is just beginning to grasp the potential. And google should be careful, because there are some other companies that have it in their sights, such as microsoft. And thats a big deal when microsoft comes after you. It is, indeed. Bill gates has admitted that, google kicked our butt in internet search. Bill gates doesnt like to have his butt kicked, so he Just Launched a prototype of microsoft Search Engine. Bill gates breathing down your necks. Do you feel this . Do you feel a pressure . We do not today. Its perfectly possible that the current competitors can all compete and coexist actually quite well at least for a few years, so i disagree with the people who say that this is a zerosum game. Its googles strategy to downplay the threat from gates, but that doesnt mean theyre not fighting back. Google is betting that its troops will continue to innovate faster than anyone elses. Everyone assumes that were busy competing in the last war, when, in fact, were going to invent something new. Thats how google works. Whatever product idea i have is from the old times, and they say, oh, eric, what a stupid idea. Why dont you try this new idea . Which i havent thought about. Thats the genius of google. [stopwatch ticking] can google manage the companys explosive success . 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Page is shy, almost introverted, brin more outgoing, something of a showman. Is it true that youre a gymnast . Ive done various acrobatic things over time. I took some gymnastics classes at stanford, and ive taken some circus classes since then, and yeah, so the flying trapeze and trampoline and things. Really . Really . Yeah, justbut im not very good. What he is good atand page as wellis writing computer code. They met as phd students at stanford, where both were trying to figure out how to make information easier to find on the internet. They realized that a lot of Search Engines of the time the dark ages 1998inundated you with a bewildering, disorganized list of every website that contained the words you were searching for. And we said, well, no, its actually our job to produce the best possible results. So your breakthrough was saying, heres the most important, then the second most important, and so forth. Thats correct. Brin and pages breakthrough was as series of Algorithms Software codethat created a ranking system by relevance for the internet. They installed their software on stanfords computers. So how did you get from stanford and this sort of theoretical project you were doing for your phd into a business . Well, we had created a test Search Engine. Which they named google, a play on the word googol, a math term meaning 1 followed by 100 zeros. We just let a few of our friends know about it so they would go to that website with a test Search Engine, try it out, and people started to use it more and more, and word spread. You know, it really started to grow, and eventually, we ran out of computers. They started building their own computers and moved into their World Headquarters that garage. We were very conservative. We didnt hire very many people. We never ran super bowl ads, like many other dotcoms. Remember, this was at the height of the dotcom boom. When that boom went bust in late 2000, says Silicon Valley author john battelle, google was one of the few survivors. Google was this odd company thatit seemed like the internet bust never happened. The lava lamps were going. They had a chef. They had parties. Everyone was happy. Everyone seemed to be enjoying their work. Now, most of the Silicon Valley, the opposite was true. It was a smoldering wreckage, and so they hired some of the smartest, best engineers they could find during a time when they were so thankful to have a job. There was Something Else different about google, the Company Motto do no evil. Where did that come from, and what does it really mean . We tried to boil it down at some point to a code of conduct, so to speak, for google well, how do we make all our decisions . For example, we dont mix our ads with our search results. We always label the advertising clearly down the side of the page. And that comes under do no evil. Thats right. Theres no business relationship or anything that controls the search results. To this day, google has never run a tv commercial. Their popularity has spread literally around the world by word of mouth as people everywhere search for everything under the sun. So lets do a search for 60 minutes, and these are web pages that contain the term 60 minutes. 19 million web pages found by googles computers in a fifth of a second. But it seems to me that all of the ones that are listed here in a fast glancing down are all controversial. Theyre all pieces that ran on 60 minutes that have created some kind of controversy. And thats a big problem with google. Its ranking system tends to put negative events or statements at the top of the list. If you google a person, for instance, what kind of picture of that person can you really get . An entirely skewed one, in my opinion. When anybody puts in a name and that person has had a terrible event. That will become her life. That will become who she is in the world. Google ceo eric schmidt. As hard as we try, we have not yet understood how to make value and moral judgments about information, and we cant distinguish between hugely popular Accurate Information and hugely popular dated information skewed. Or skewed. Yeah. We try our best, but its imperfect. Were working on better ways of understanding. Thats not their only challenge. The main thing now is managing the companys explosive success. Theyre expanding so quickly that they might just blow up, that they wheels might just come off, and its very difficult to manage a company thats growing as quickly as google. Are people inside saying, oh, my god. It could get out of control . We worry about it every day. Weve put a set of systems in place to try to address it. Our internal enemy is growing and losing control of that growth. A good example google is hiring about 25 new people every week, and it receives more than 1,000 resumes a day, but they are determined to stick to their rigorous screening process. The most important thing that i do is to try to hire the best people, and we do it with a huge team here. Alan eustace is the engineer whos in charge of luring computer geeks to google. What is this . The glat is the google labs aptitude test. Its kind of a fun challenge. Its not a fun challenge. Its the most intimidating thing ive ever seen in my life. Google recently placed these tests in technical magazines hoping some really big brains would tackle the really hard problems. How many different ways can you color an icosahedron with one of three colors on each face . You dont even understand that question. No, i do. Its a 20side polyhedron. But its an interesting problem. Theres a certain class of people in the world that thinks those problems are fun. Heres one what number comes next in this sequence 10, 9, 60, 90, 70, 66 . If you can answer that, you might get a job interview, and then another and another. One recent hire had 14 interviews before they got the job, and that was in the pr department. Its not necessarily an easy process to get the best people, the most motivated people, people that are on a mission. Once they do get them, google does Everything Possible to keep them happy. One day, were sitting in my staff meeting, and larry said, were not having enough parties. And i said to the two of them, we have more parties than any other company ive ever seen. And they said, we have to have another party. It looks like every day is a party. Good stuff today, guys. They have a fantastic cafeteria, where the food is all free, and you can get chinese, mexican, deli food, kosher food, any kind of food all free. All free. In fact, the Company Makes money by having that free lunch, because people stay on campus. They dont go out. They dont waste time. Often, they get the food and go back to their desks. This is crucial. As wellfed and casual as they may look, these folks are intense, burnthemidnight fluorescent workaholics all trying to come up with googles next big thing. Google has teams working on all sorts of changetheworld ideas. What do you think is next . What do you think their next big breakthrough is likely to be . I think it could be summed up in search will no longer live only on your pc. Sergey brin wont say if thats googles future, but there is one ambition he admits to. You never got your phd. You dropped out to do this. Were technically on leave of absence right now. Will you ever go back and get it . You know, my mom asks me every week, so. She still wants you to have your phd, something to fall back on. So i actually do keep meaning to finish it, and i havent found quite the slot of time. Google remains the dominant Search Engine on the internet, but with the launch of its Android Software for mobile phones in 2008, the company has become a significant player in Wireless Communications as well. Much has changed in the life of sergey brin since our interview in 2006. He married Anne Wojcicki in 2007 and is now a father, and he has taken on a very personal quest. In 2008, he learned that he carries a genetic mutation that increases his odds of contracting parkinsons disease. As a consequence, he has contributed more than 50 million to help Fund Research for a cure. [stopwatch ticking] coming up, the man who literally changed the face of the internet. You seem to be replacing larry and sergey as the people out here who everyones talking about. Youre just staring at me. Is that a question . The cofounder of facebook, Mark Zuckerberg next, when 60 minutes on cnbc returns. 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