New Delhi: On the sidelines of the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit 2009, held on 30-31 October, Nikesh Arora, president of global sales operations and business development at Google Inc. and a member of the company’s operating committee, spoke about Google’s approach to copyright law, factors changing the Internet and how the company can grow without turning “evil”. Edited excerpts:
During your session, you spoke about how the Internet is becoming more social and more real-time. Content is being produced all the time by millions of people through Facebook, Twitter and other networks. How does this affect Google’s most important business: search?
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The Internet is not unstructured. It is really a mass of structured information that you need to figure out a way of navigating through. The Web has changed very significantly in two ways. First, the sheer volume of data being added has increased rapidly. In the last five years, more data and content have been generated than in the previous 100 years combined. Secondly, the speed of updates has increased tremendously. Think about it. A regular newspaper is updated once a day. A newspaper’s website used to be updated at the same speed. But now, even these websites are updated continuously during the day.
These two changes put tremendous amounts of pressure on technological resources. That’s the biggest challenge.
How does this affect your core search advertising business? How do you engage with advertisers in this changed environment?
Firm stand: Nikesh Arora says the need to innovate is what drives Google and not being ‘evil’ is something all its employees believe in. Sanjeev Verma / Hindustan Times
The first question is how do you engage with the consumer, with the user of your products. Google needs to keep delivering information. We like to say we are just one click away from the competition. The day you don’t find what you want with Google, you’ll go somewhere else. And so will advertisers.
So, we are constantly working on our advertising service and algorithms, as hard as we are working on keeping users happy. The idea is to make advertising look as much as possible like information. If you are in a desert, a billboard for drinking water is information. But six billboards in one place is advertising.
How are Internet users responding to this surfeit of information?
There is this constant debate: is the Internet making people less social or more social? Should I let my child use the Internet on his computer?
Today, people can whip out a mobile phone and immediately search for a piece of information. Research shows that the ability to instantly find information is a much better way to retain and process this information than having to remember it and cram it down.