What do you think the impact of this technology could be?
We expect that search will become the preferred way to access these systems. If I want to access my CRM system, if I want to quickly grab a piece of information out of my business intelligence system, I don't have to be an expert in those systems anymore. I can type a few keywords into Google and get that information.

So, it has the potential to make all these systems that are already installed, already paid for, already being used by experts—all of a sudden that information can be much more quickly and broadly available to the rest of the company.

Let's just talk about Cognos for a second. In most companies that have Cognos—which obviously has a huge market share, it's a great, successful BI company—probably 5 or 10 percent of the employees in that company even know it's there and have access to it. And they've been trained on it and they use it every day.

Well, there's probably another huge percentage—40 or 50 or 60 percent of the employee base—to which that Cognos system could have a lot of value if it was accessible, and if they could get the information in a short, meaningful way. But they're not experts at building cubes or extracting information from a BI system.

But a company will get a lot more usage out of systems it's already paid for, and I think that's probably the most important thing for people to consider. It is a lightweight, fast, easy way to provide access to systems which, until now, have only been under the domain of the experts in those systems.

What about information outside the enterprise?
Let's say your company has signed up for premium content from somebody, say a some market research firm. Instead of having to log in to the system from IDC, or wherever, why shouldn't that just show up at the top of my search results?

Even that's a huge improvement, because it used to be that you had to call your research person, who would send the report to you. But now I have a searchbox in the middle of my page, and I can access the IDC reports that my company's paying for with a few clicks of the mouse. Or keyboard.

So this helps to find information. Will Google do anything to help companies work with the information they find?
I've been asked questions like that before. Questions like, "Will this be the end of business intelligence?" And my reaction is that asking a search engine, "Go tell me which of my customers are the most profitable ones," is an incredibly difficult artificial-intelligence problem. If I assigned that to a staffer, they would need to ask me six or seven qualifying questions before they could find that out. So search isn't going to have that level of impact in the next few years. In ten years, who knows? But, to have an engine that has that level of omniscience is pretty far out there. It's certainly something we dig into.

Having said that, a little more here-and-now and pragmatic is, if you wanted to ask, for example, "When might George, Mike and I all be available today?" Obviously, a search engine can do that if you can imagine a Microsoft Exchange or some form of calendar plug-in that could do that from a simple query. That's simplistic, but I think search will do more and more in terms of not just looking for information but actually taking action.

So what's next for Google?
We're still in the first or second inning of search, so we'll never be done with that. But we really want to reach the point where, in your average company, a very high proportion of the company's information of all flavors, structured and unstructured, is available through a single search box. And like I said, we're very early in that game, so there's a lot of work to be done there.

Does Google want to become the operating system?
Well, I can say that, for years, most of the business-application vendors have been moving their primary interface to a browser-based interface from the clients. So maybe we're just the next generation of that trend. Now that everything is, in effect, a Web app, all of a sudden a simple Web-style search engine that you know and love may become the preferred jumping off point to get into those applications. That's how I see things evolving here. It's the next generation of Web technology pushing its way into the enterprise.