INTERNET The bottom line at Google: ideas first, dollars second

The search engine company continues to resist offering stock.
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Around the globe, Google has become a synonym for searching the Internet, as in, "Let's 'Google' that."
In Silicon Valley, the Mountain View, Calif., business is the hottest private company around, with a good shot at becoming a legend like Netscape, Apple or eBay.
Founded by a pair of Stanford graduate students in 1998, Google reinvented online searching. Today, the company says it handles 200 million searches a day, and according to some estimates, about 75 percent of all search-engine-generated traffic to Web sites.
Google, with 800 employees and growing fast, won't disclose its finances. But speculation within the industry is that Google will ring up $400 million to $700 million in sales this year, most of it from using technology to target relevant ads to Web users. The company says it has been making money since December 2000.
Thinking big
Yet profits alone don't seem to be enough for Google's two ambitious young founders. Their ethos of thinking big evokes other celebrated companies that tried to change the world through technology. The mindset has trickled down through Google's geek-filled staff and is enforced by an official policy that company engineers devote a quarter of their time to thinking up great, new ideas -- even if their financial promise is questionable.
In many ways, co-founders Larry Page, 30, and Sergey Brin, 29, have the quintessential valley story: using Stanford as a lab for their brainchild, launching in a garage and attracting high-tech's premier venture capitalists.
They represent a new dot.com generation focused on perfecting their product and turning a profit -- before going public, not after.
Although many investors and employees would love to see a Google initial public offering, the two founders recently have dampened those expectations. Going public would invite scrutiny of the company's bottom line, which could lead to short-term thinking and cautious strategy, they warn.
Instead, Google is tackling one of the biggest challenges of modern life: helping people find information that's important to them.
"It's a really important, big problem for the world," Brin said.
Branching out
Brin and Page so far have had their way, demanding only the sharpest technology, hiring only the smartest of employees and plowing ahead with ideas, sometimes quirky, that will take Google deeper into the lives of Internet users.
There's Google News, thought up on an employee's whim, which offers up-to-the-minute news stories culled from 4,500 sources. There's the indexing of photos and catalogs. There's Froogle.com, a product search site.
Google's biggest moneymaker is advertising. It gets paid to place small text ads above and next to noncommercial search results on its own site and the sites of partners such as America Online and Amazon.com. Google says its 100,000 advertisers make it the world's largest Web-ad network.
Humble beginnings
Google started with two Stanford computer science students, both sons of math professors. Brin, born in Moscow, and Page, from Michigan, sought to prove that a mathematical analysis of the links among Web sites could produce better search results than simply counting keywords. They defined relevancy by the number and quality of links to a Web site.
The founders and first few employees met around a pingpong table in a Menlo Park garage. During a 1998 meeting with early investors, Sun Microsystems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim tired of listening to Brin and Page worry about spending money. He raced back to his Porsche and insisted on writing them a $100,000 check. He made it out to Google.
No such entity existed, forcing Brin and Page to set up the company in order to cash it. Google is a play on "googol" -- the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros -- a reference to organizing the seemingly infinite Web.
Complementary strengths
Although they have given up a sizable stake in the company to venture capitalists, the eccentric founding pair are Google's cultural soul.
Page is the more cerebral of the two, the big thinker who also worries about whether his engineers will like their new digs. Brin, insiders say, has more business instinct, is the negotiator and has a sharp sense of humor that usually involves poking fun at his co-founder.
"Of the two of us, Larry will always take the extreme position," Brin said. When the subject of free employee lunches came up, Page proposed a plan to feed the world. They compromised on free staff lunches and dinners.
Google headquarters, known as the Googleplex, is a throwback to the late 1990s. In the lobby, decorated with lava lamps and giant plastic balls, an engineer takes a break to play a baby grand piano. A pool table is nearby, and Brin and Page zip around on their new Segway scooters.
Benefits include company-paid, midweek ski trips to Squaw Valley and maternity and paternity leaves with 75 percent pay.
While most of the tech world buzzes about an IPO, Google's founders hold firm to their technological ambitions -- building, in Page's words, "the ultimate search engine."
"It would understand exactly what you type and would give you the right things back," Page said. "We're pretty good, but we're nowhere close to being perfect. We won't be for a long time."