Technology Quotes

Sergey and I founded Google because we're super optimistic about the potential for technology to make the world a better place.

It's important to distinguish between "worry versus harm" when it came to privacy online.

We have always tried to concentrate on the long term, and to place bets on technology we believe will have a significant impact over time.

When I was working on Android, I felt guilty. It wasn't what we were working on, it was a start-up, and I felt guilty. That was stupid! It was the future.

You can make an internet company with 10 people and it can have billions of users. It doesn't take much capital and it makes a lot of money - a really, really lot of money - so it's natural for everyone to focus on those kinds of things.

In late 1995, I started collecting the links on the Web, because my advisor and I decided that would be a good thing to do. We didn't know exactly what I was going to do with it, but it seemed like no one was really looking at the links on the Web - which pages link to which pages.

Stanford would be first. You can take universities and just rank them, and they come out in the order you'd expect. So we thought, "This is really interesting. This thing really works. We should use it for search." So I started building a search engine.

Sergey also came on very early, probably in late '95 or early '96, and was really interested in the data mining part. Basically, we thought, "Oh, we should be able to make a better search engine."

Search engines didn't really understand the notion of which pages were more important. If you typed "Stanford," you got random pages that mentioned Stanford. This obviously wasn't going to work.

From a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology and also then, soon after, in business, because I figured that inventing things wasn't any good; you really had to get them out into the world and have people use them to have any effect.

I just sort of kept having ideas. We had a lot of magazines lying around our house. It was kind of messy. So you kind of read stuff all the time, and I would read Popular Science and things like that. I just got interested in stuff, I guess, technology and how devices work.

I wanted to be able to build things. Actually, in college I built an inkjet printer out of Legos, because I wanted to be able to print really big images. I figured you could print really big posters really cheaply using inkjet cartridges. So I reverse-engineered the cartridge, and I built all the electronics and mechanics to drive it. Just sort of fun projects. I like to be able to do those kinds of things.

Kids certainly don't have fear of using computers now. It's the same kind of thing. If you grow up in environments where you have ICs (integrated circuits) lying around, you don't have fear of that either.

I am really excited about the possibility of data also, to improve health. Imagine you had the ability to search people's medical records in the US. I imagine that would save 10,000 lives in the first year.

Well, this is the state of the art right now, understanding cats on YouTube and things like that, improving voice recognition. We used a lot of machine learning to improve things incrementally, but I think for me, this example's really exciting, because it's one program that can do a lot of different things.

You carry a phone. It knows where you are. There's so much more information about you, and that's an important thing, and it makes sense why people are asking difficult questions.

I think the main thing that we need to do is just provide people choice, show them what data's being collected -- search history, location data. We're excited about incognito mode in Chrome, and doing that in more ways, just giving people more choice and more awareness of what's going on.

So I guess I'm just very worried that with Internet privacy, we're doing the same thing we're doing with medical records, is we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and we're not really thinking about the tremendous good that can come from people sharing information with the right people in the right ways.

If you look at things like Google Now also. Maybe you want to just have [a question] answered for you before you ask it.

We will not fail. Our country will thrive and prosper again. We stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space, to free the Earth from the miseries of disease, and to harness the energies, industries, and technologies of tomorrow. A new national pride will stir our souls, lift our sights, and heal our divisions.