Search Me?

Silicon Valley cliche to the contrary, Wojcicki -- who was a friend of a friend of Brin's with a new house and mortgage worries -- says she rented them more than just a garage. "They had the garage and three bedrooms and two bathrooms," she recalls, confirming and clarifying the Legend of the Google Guys. "Yes, they stored stuff in the garage and they had servers and they had meetings. But it was winter, so it was actually kind of cold."

Laughing, she continues:

"The washing machine was in the garage, too. That was considered a key asset at the time."

Wojcicki is now the company's vice president for product management. As such, she's been involved in the book-scanning project for years. She's talking, on this blue-sky California day, in a small conference room crammed with colorful beanbag chairs. Outside, the lunchtime barbecue is over -- Google is famous for its perpetually free food -- and people zip from building to building on bright yellow motorized scooters.

Digitizing all the world's books "was an idea of Sergey and Larry's from very early on," Wojcicki says. In fact, they were supposed to be working on a small library digitization project "when they wound up creating a search engine, which today we know as Google."

Brin and Page tried to "monetize" their brainchild by peddling it to established Internet companies. When that didn't work, they switched to an advertising strategy -- but one that differed fundamentally from most Web advertising at the time. Rather than intrusive banner ads or pop-ups, the pair went with text-only advertising tied to the key words Google searchers typed in.

Worked like a charm. In the summer of 2004, Google went public and the Google Guys became instant multibillionaires. Google employees and investors (Stanford prominent among them) got a lot richer as well.

You'd think building a company that "may supplant Microsoft as the most important -- and most profitable -- corporation ever created" (as journalist John Battelle put it in his 2005 book "The Search") would have kept the pair busy enough. But no: According to Wojcicki, they never lost sight of their digital library dream.

She first heard them talk about it in early 2000, when "we didn't have the resources even to do our core business." But Brin and Page did more than just talk, even then:

"They actually would do some of the math behind it," Wojcicki says, "and calculate, like, how many machines it would take, how many hours it would take. So they knew with certain assumptions that it was a doable project."

It got more doable as the bucks started pouring in.

Brin and Page set a team of engineers to work on scanning technology. Later, they asked Wojcicki and her people to start acquiring books to scan. The first move was to negotiate with publishers for access to their current books.