Silverstein, 31, left his doctoral studies at Stanford University in 1998, joining school chums Sergey Brin and Larry Page in a nearby garage to build the now famed search engine.
It turned out to be a wise diversion, too, now that the search company is poised to raise US$2.7 billion in one of the hottest tech initial public offerings since 2000.
Imminent wealth aside, Silverstein has long been a champion of working hard and whistling while you do it. As Google's director of technology, he balances pie-in-the-sky visions for search -- in other words, artificially intelligent search pets -- and churning out products that improve people's access to information. Just a sampling includes new technology to personalise the company's Web site; comparative shopping prices on wireless devices; and the ability to send, store and manage up to 1 gigabyte of free e-mail, otherwise known as Gmail.
In an interview before Google's IPO filing, Silverstein discussed the backlash against Gmail among privacy advocates, the company's cultural changes and its shifting reliance on PageRank, the mathematical algorithm that has helped Google shine. The company recently renewed an exclusive PageRank licence from Stanford that's valid through 2011.
Q: What is your perspective on Google's role in the history of search?
A: Google was in the right place at the right time. The history of search, since the advent of computers, is one where more and more information is available for people, and you need ever more sophisticated techniques to make sense of it and to make it useful -- and Google was at the cusp of [that].
You have portrayed the ideal search engine as one resembling the intelligence of the Starship Enterprise or a world populated with intelligent search pets. Can you talk a little bit about those ideas?
Well, the third idea is having the computer be as smart as a reference librarian. That's interesting, because reference librarians, of course, use computers, use Google to help them search, but they put some element of intelligence into it that the computer cannot do by itself.
So, part of the goal is to make computers smart enough so that when you interact with them, they can do something with that information to help you actually get better results. That is certainly something Google thinks about to improve quality.
would you please turn off the meta-refresh?