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Does the world have reason to fear Google? It's a question that's beginning to be asked as the company collects increasing amounts of information from millions of individuals worldwide and develops enormous corporate muscle.
Since listing on the United States Nasdaq exchange in 2004, its share price has gone from about US$100 ($142) to more than US$500, making Google worth about US$160 billion.
Its revenue this year is expected to be about US$16 billion with about a quarter of that profit. Not bad for a company started by a pair of university students little more than a decade ago.
The company trades on the motto "Don't be evil", which is a great way to engender good feelings among the millions of people who make free use of its search engine and other applications, and the millions who provide revenue by using its AdWords online advertising service.
Google may dominate the internet search market but the motto still holds good, says New Zealander Craig Nevill-Manning, director of the company's New York software engineering facility. Despite having about 10 times the number of staff it had when it listed (more than 13,000 people), Nevill-Manning says Google succeeds in keeping its original corporate values intact.
For one thing, it recruits carefully, choosing people who are clever and will fit into the company culture; that is, "be nice people to work with". Secondly, it's a case of leading by example.
From founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin down, says Nevill-Manning, the company's ethical vow is followed faithfully.
And chief executive Eric Schmidt, who comes from a corporate computing background, is another adherent. "He's definitely a guardian of the culture as well," Nevill-Manning says. "Culture is one of these things that as long as you nurture it, it takes care of itself."
Nevill-Manning ended up at Google after embarking a decade ago on an academic career in the United States. After completing a PhD at the University of Waikato, he went to Stanford in California to do a post-doctoral fellowship. At Stanford, he ran into PhD students Page and Brin, whose ears pricked up at a couple of lectures he gave on work he'd been doing back in New Zealand.
There, with Professor Ian Witten and others, he had been developing an indextechnical reports from around the world. "We were doing some ground-breaking stuff back then ."
Nevill-Manning was intent on sticking with university life and, after two years, left Stanford for a teaching job at Rutgers. From there, he resisted Page's first attempt to recruit him to his newly launched search engine company.
"Larry emailed me and said, 'we're starting Google as a company, why don't you come and join us?' But I said I was doing the academic thing.
"But a couple of years later I decided Google seemed pretty interesting, so I moved to California to join the company."
Nevill-Manning's PhD thesis might have been tailor-made for a job at Google. Titled Inferring sequential structure, it was, says Nevill-Manning, essentially "about designing computer algorithms that take an enormous amount of data and make sense of it by looking at repeating patterns". Just what Google does, in fact.
Google's page-ranking algorithm is the company's crown jewels and its refinement absorbs much of the software engineering effort.
Nevill-Manning's main claim to fame, however, was development of Froogle, a shopping search tool whose prototype he built and "cheesy" name he came up with. The name has given way to the more bland Google Product Search, because the original pun didn't translate for non-English speakers, the majority of Google users.
The company blends building applications with doing advanced research, according to Nevill-Manning, with resources at its disposal that put even well-funded US universities in the shade.
"The scale we operate at in terms of computing machinery is much larger [than academia] and so we're better able, I think, to push the boundaries of what's possible in computer science, which is what drives me."
The scale of its computing resources is a secret, with Nevill-Manning refusing to be drawn on how large, how many and what the location is of the company's data centres. He says though, that Google's policy is to place them where electricity and floor space are cheap, and in smaller communities that it can support by providing jobs.
Aside from one glaring deficiency - lack of internet bandwidth - New Zealand might seem an ideal location. The company has a low-profile presence in this country, which Nevill-Manning says will be expanded. "We've had advertisers in New Zealand for some time and we're now making a bigger investment by building an office here."
That means hiring a general manager. Anyone interested in finding out more about the role should do an online search - with Google.
* Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland-based technology journalist.
