Brin, Schmidt eye further Google expansion

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IDG News Service - Despite Google's phenomenal growth, the Internet search company does not appear to be worried about taking on too many projects, judging from comments made at a media roundtable Wednesday with company cofounder Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt.

Though Google is expanding into multiple areas such as operating systems, applications, online books and display advertising, more than 90% of company revenue comes from keyword-related search advertising, acknowledged Schmidt, who is also the chairman of the company. Schmidt and Brin, who rarely makes public appearances, sat down with journalists at the company's New York headquarters to field questions about a wide variety of topics.

"In technology ... you either grow or die," Schmidt said. Nevertheless, the company is not hiring as frequently as it once did, which may help it better absorb the changes it has made over the past few years, Brin pointed out. "I'm not sure we'll ever double from the headcount we have now," Brin said.

From its consumer-focused roots, Google has been expanding into the enterprise market with its enterprise search appliance and applications. Developing for the consumer and corporate markets may not be as different as some observers might think, according to Brin.

"Increasingly all of our offerings are available to both the enterprise and the consumer ... and many of the features that the enterprise users are asking for are the same as what small and medium-size companies are asking for," Brin said. Many of Google's offerings were "born from an internal need," he pointed out.

"We've focused on some things that would work in an enterprise and also rolled it out to consumers," Brin said.

In 2004, for example, "webmail was really a toy," Brin added. With Gmail, the company pushed further than competitors, offering technology that was able to handle large amounts of data in the cloud, he pointed out. Some products like the Picasa photo-editing and -sharing technology are not aimed at enterprises but will be eventually, Brin said.

"I think the cloud model is a better model" for applications, Brin said. "Think about all the upgrades you ... never have to see again."

Increasing and ensuring uptime is a key to winning over enterprise customers, Brin acknowledged, in response to a comment that Google has suffered two outages recently. The company is trying to adjust its underlying network architecture, he noted, "grouping users into pods so (outages) don’t have this kind of chain reaction."

Despite Google's efforts to expand into multiple technologies, however, "search needs to get better ... faster," Schmidt said. Google's working on a number of projects to enhance search technology. Not all of the search options on what Google calls the "tool belt" are available across applications such as image and video search, Brin noted. "I'd like to see all of the options available."