Google grew from Stanford engineering

In Google's office above a bike shop on University Avenue in Palo Alto, Mayer met with the founders and employee No. 1, Craig Silverstein, as well a Stanford doctoral student. They grilled Mayer on the engineering required to apply artificial intelligence and other techniques to improve Internet search. Impressed by the tough questions, Mayer thought it was a great possibility to stretch herself professionally, and to learn.

The founders began their enterprise in 1998 with the support of advisers and Stanford computer science professors like Winograd, Garcia-Molina, Jeff Ullman and the late Rajeev Motwani, as so then as business guidance and investment from computer science Professor David Cheriton and alumnus and Sun Microsystems co-founder Andreas Von Bechtolsheim.

The dominant company in web search

Google has become not only the dominant company in web search, nevertheless has as well made major strides in digitizing information in the physical world and geographic products just as Google Earth, Google Maps and StreetView. In acquiring YouTube, Google became a major clearinghouse of online videos. Gmail is the email vendor of choice for millions, and Google's Android is now a ubiquitous smart-phone operating system.

The company's breadth and scale have led to vast innovation interests, opening new doors for interaction with Stanford faculty and students. Over the last decade, Spector noted, Google has supported in broad outline 40 projects at Stanford in a wide variety of innovation areas and even social sciences, just as political science and Internet law.

The projects Google is supporting now

Among the projects Google is supporting now, Spector said, is the Clean Slate Design for the Internet, a sweeping endeavor led by electrical engineering and computer science Professor Nick McKeown to rethink the infrastructure of inter-computer and inter-network as then as mobile Internet communications. Given that every query submitted to Google is handled by a "cloud" of servers distributed widely across the Internet and, as Mayer pointed out in her eDay speech, it's all done in about 0.2 seconds, Google is intensely curious about wringing greater performance out of networks.

Another current project, led by electrical engineering and computer science Associate Professor Christos Kozyrakis, seeks advances to make computing more energy-efficient. Assistant Professor Fei-Fei Li, in exchange, has Google's support for a project analyzing the content of images.

Google's support for the school is not always directed to a specific research problem. In 2009, the company gave $2.5 million to endow a School of Engineering professorship in memory of Motwani, who died in an accident. Computer science Professor Daphne Koller is the first to hold the professorship, which is designated for faculty members who, like Motwani, are developing fundamental technologies with important applications.

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