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The reason that Google was such a success is because they were the first ones to take advantage of the self-organizing properties of the web. It's in ecological sustainability. It's in the developmental power of entrepreneurship, the ethical power of democracy.

The largest issue with search is that we learned about it when the web was young, when the universe was 'complete' - the entire web was searchable! Now our digital lives are utterly fractured - in apps, in walled gardens like Facebook, across clunky interfaces like those in automobiles or Comcast cable boxes.

I was really excited by the idea that people were sharing information now and discovering information in a totally new way on the Internet via Twitter and Facebook, yet that experience was pretty clunk and just lots of bit.ly links.

I think the search engines are the new equivalent of publishing: an enabler of information.

Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.

I think the most difficult thing had been scaling the infrastructure. Trying to support the response we had received from our users and the number of people that were interested in using the software.

That is really not much different from the search engines that are being constructed today for users throughout the entire world to allow them to search through databases to access the information that they require.

Google search was important - one of the most important applications ever on the Web. People accessed everything through a browser, and for us it was important for making sure we had an option there.

The Google algorithm was a significant development. I've had thank-you emails from people whose lives have been saved by information on a medical website or who have found the love of their life on a dating website.

It's actually not unlike Google at that stage of development. They had an up-and-running site. It wasn't losing very much money, it wasn't making very much money, but it was growing.