Since 2004, when Google began to have annual reports, Larryand I have taken turns writing an annual letter. I never imaginedI would be writing one in the midst o an economic crisis unlikeany we have seen in decades. As I write this, search queriesare relecting economic hardship, the major market indexesare one-hal o what they were less than 18 months ago, andunemployment is at record levels.
Nonetheless, I am optimistic about the uture, becauseI believe scarcity breeds clarity: it ocuses minds, orcingpeople to think creatively and rise to the challenge.While much smaller in scale than today’s global collapse,the dot-com bust o 2000-2002 pushed Google andothers in the industry to make some tough decisions —and we all emerged stronger as a result.This new crisis punctuates the end o our first decadeas a company, a decade that has brought great changeto Google, the web and the Internet as a whole. As I reflecton this short time period, our accomplishments andour shortcomings, I am very excited about what the next10 years may bring.But let me start a little arther back — in 1990, the veryfirst web page was created at http://ino.cern.ch/. By late1992, there were only 26 websites in the world, so therewas not much need or a search engine. When NCSAMosaic (the first widely-used web browser) came out in1993, every new website that was created would getposted to its “What’s New” page ata rate o about one a day. Just five yearslater, in 1998, web pages numbered inthe tens o millions, and search becamecrucial. At this point, Google was a smallresearch project at Stanord; later thatyear, it became a tiny startup. The searchindex sat on a small number o diskdrives enclosed within Lego-like blocks. Perhaps a ewthousand people, mostly academics, used the service.Fast orward to today, the changes in scale are striking.The web itsel has grown by about a actor o 10,000,as has our search index. The number o people who useGoogle’s services every day is now in the hundreds omillions. More importantly, billions o people now haveaccess to the Internet via computers and mobile phones.Like many other web companies, the vast majority o ourservices are available worldwide and ree to users becausethey are supported by ads. So a child in an Internet cae
2008 Founders’ Letter
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