(CBS) When you want to find one Web page among the billions on the Internet, where do you start?
Well, if you're like most people, you start at Google.com. (CBSNews.com and Google have an Internet advertising sales business relationship.)
Google can help you find just about anything: facts, phone numbers, recipes, song lyrics, even the dirt on a prospective date.
"Googling" has become so commonplace that it is now a verb. Google can search 5 billion Web pages in 2/10 of a second, and people do it 200 million times a day, in 100 different languages, from German to pig latin. But, as CBS News Sunday Morning Contributor David Pogue reports, the inside story of Google may be more interesting. ...
One may think it might be fun to work at Google, and they're not alone. "We get over 1,500 résumés a day of people who are applying to Google," according to Susan Wojcicki.
But if you want to get hired, you'll have to have to fit in with Google's corporate philosophy, which is: "Don't be evil." Today, Employee Number 1 Craig Silverstein is Google's director of technology. "The focus that Google has on our users, you know, a very slim homepage and so forth -- text ads, not banner," says Silverstein. "We do that because we don't want to go to sites with banner ads. We don't like them." ...
What's next for Google? Going public, for one thing. Analysts are putting Google's value at $20 billion -- the first major Silicon Valley stock offering in years, and the biggest ever. Google won't talk about it, but brokers worldwide have dilated pupils and sweaty palms.
At that point, hundreds of instant millionaires will walk the halls of the Googleplex, and a few fancier new cars will fill the parking lot. But despite the tiny distraction of $20 billion, Google's executives hope they can keep their eye on the ball. For them, cataloging the Web is only the beginning.
"My guess is about 300 years until computers are as good as, say, your local reference library in doing search," says Craig Silverstein. "But we can make slow and steady progress, and maybe one day we'll get there."