It all started with one of those emails that you assume must be the result of an administrative error.

Dear Paul,

I’m writing from Google Europe ‘06. We’re hosting an event later this year called ‘Zeitgeist’, bringing together some of the top thinkers in the Internet industry to discuss trends…

…blah blah…

…Speakers include David Cameron, Peter Gabriel, Martin Sorrell… and Google CEO Eric Schmidt ….

…blah blah…

I wondered whether you might be interested in either speaking at the event or joining a panel…

…blah…

…hang on…

…what?

It must be a mistake. Why on earth would Google possibly invite me to contribute to an event like that? A former newspaper journalist whose only success to date was bringing together web and print. And they wanted to put me on the same bill as those guys? It just didn’t make any sense.

But at the same time, it sort of did.

A few months earlier, Google had launched a bold initiative to scan the world’s books and to make them searchable online, in the same way as they make websites searchable now. The plan had caused all kinds of outcry from traditional publishers who claimed that, by scanning books, the search engine giant was breaching their copyrights.

The publishers were right, of course; scanning books in their entirety and storing them on a giant database was a clear breach of the copyrights that publishers have in books, copyrights that only expire seventy years after the author dies. But they were also being short-sighted: when Google’s book search returned results from a book, they also linked to various online booksellers where hard copies could be bought. Google’s database had always contained a copy (called a ‘cache’) of the contents of all the websites they indexed, in order to make searching quicker and more efficient. No one ever complained about that. Why should books be different?

There was also the potential for everyone involved to make quite a lot of money out of the scheme, something I’d been trying to encourage publishers to consider – even hosting an online debate on the subject (backed by one of the few forward-thinking publishing CEOs, Richard Charkin from Macmillan, who has since moved to Bloomsbury) .

Evidently my experience in the middle of this strange Internet and book publishing Venn diagram qualified me to be a speaker at this super-exclusive conference, hosted by the world’s biggest search engine. They were offering to pay my transport costs and to put me up in the country house hotel that was hosting the two-day event. They would even give me a spare ticket for the second day of the event to allow me to bring along a friend. How could I resist?

Annoyingly, a couple of weeks before the event I got a second email. Due to scheduling issues, the email explained, there wasn’t going to be any room on the schedule for me to speak after all. Clearly Google had either found someone who was actually qualified to address such an illustrious audience or they’d realised that they’d invited the wrong person in the first place. My money was on the latter, but – the email went on – to make up for it they’d still be delighted to have me as their guest for the event, and I could still stay in a nice hotel. Although, now that I wasn’t a speaker, I would have to slum it in the hotel down the road with the other attendees – the CEOs of companies who advertised on Google and various other Internet bosses. That suited me just fine. Five-star or four, a free shower cap is a free shower cap.

The event was to be hosted at the Grove hotel and spa in Hertfordshire, a venue so exclusive that the hotel’s website offers instructions for arriving by car, train, helicopter and boat (‘by boat: allow eight hours from London’s Regent’s Park’). I opted for the train and then took a minicab from the station.

‘I’ll get as close as I can but it’s a bloody circus up there, ‘ said the cab driver when I told him where I was going, ‘what with all the TV cameras camped out.’

‘Really?’ I asked. ‘TV cameras?’ God, this must be an even bigger event than I thought.

‘Yeah. They all want pictures of him, don’t they. David.’ TV cameras camped out? For David Cameron? Christ, it must be a slow news week in Hertfordshire.

‘Well, him and her, obviously, she’s here, too. You know, the missus. I might stick around myself and see if I can see her.’

Now there’s no denying that David and Samantha Cameron had a certain glamour, but I was amazed that the cab driver was so impressed. It was only when we got to the hotel that it became obvious there was no way on earth this media scrum was here for the leader of the Conservative Party. Lining the driveway were men with huge cameras slung around their necks and behind them stood gangs of teenage girls holding signs saying ‘We Love You Becks!’ and ‘Posh 4 Eva’.

Fucking hell – it wasn’t the Camerons that everyone was excited about. Google had managed to get David and Victoria Beckham to speak at their conference. That was a hell of a coup – and no wonder I’d been bumped. But what the hell could the great and the good of the Internet industry possibly learn from the silent clothes horse out of the Spice Girls and a squeaky gonk whose only real skill was that he could kick a ball into a net better than almost anyone else?

I soon learned that David and Victoria weren’t at the hotel to meet Eric Schmidt or to join a panel on the Internet and the environment. Instead, they had come to the spa in Hertfordshire with the rest of the England squad to relax and recover ahead of (or perhaps after) some important game or other.((Football is not my sport.))

David and Victoria Beckham and the entire England squad, sharing a hotel and spa with the A list of geeks and nerds. For two whole days. This was going to be amazing, I thought. Like Revenge of the Nerds, but with roasting.

9.1

Unfortunately, the England management had taken some extreme steps to ensure that the England players weren't disturbed during their stay, closing off large parts of the hotel to stop the press from getting inside, and presumably to avoid David and Victoria accidentally running into any nerds in checked shirts.

The event began with a grand soire e designed to bring together all the guests for mingling and canapes. The hotel's ballroom had been decorated with all manner of technical fripperies, including dozens of elaborate lava lamps (Mathmos was apparently a sponsor) and a giant floor-projected virtual football pitch with animated balls that bounced off your feet as you walked across it. In the corner, a young magician wearing a back-to-front baseball cap made a playing card float in mid-air, to the envy of the men in suits and the amazement of the much younger and very attractive personal assistants many of the men had for some reason opted to bring with them to the remote spa in the middle of the countryside.

Realising that I literally brought nothing to the party, I decided to perch myself by one of the many free bars and engage in a bit of people watching. And what people there were. CEOs of major companies; hugely successful dot com entrepreneurs from the first and second boom; a purse((The collective noun for venture capitalists.)) of top venture capitalists; I swear an MP or two... and a flirt((The collective noun for PR girls.)) of astonishingly pretty PR girls whose job it was to make sure everyone had a drink in their hand and was having a good time. Naturally, I took my networking responsibilities seriously and shunned the once in a lifetime opportunity to mix with the creme of the creme of the business community in favour of chatting to a ridiculously hot and unconvincingly blonde PR girl called Emma. There's always an Emma.

Emma wasn 't allowed to drink alcohol while she was working so between us we hit on a devious plan. I'd order a rum and Coke for myself, a tonic water for her and a straight vodka for my 'friend' who had gone to the loo. When no one from Google was looking, I'd empty the vodka into her tonic and no one would be any the wiser. Whenever one of her bosses came past we'd seamlessly switch from whatever we were really talking about to a heated debate about Google or some other search-engine-related issue. Emma would be able to get slowly drunk while on duty and I would get to enjoy her company while neither of us had to talk to any of the dull men in suits mingling around us.

I 'd had about three or four rum and Cokes, and Emma had downed the same number of vodka tonics, when I spotted someone wearing a Google shirt heading towards the bar. It was time to put our fake conversation plan into action, pretending to be deep in discussion about something relevant.

' So, I have a theory about this event...' I began, loud enough to ensure that the Google person now standing to our left knew we were talking about work.

'Oh yes?' said Emma, playing along.

'Yes. It occurs to me that Google has hired this big hotel, invited the CEOs of some of its biggest potential rivals: the heads of rival Internet companies, the heads of telecoms companies, MPs who are in charge of competition legislation, that kind of thing.'

Out of the corner of my eye I could see the Google person eyeing us up. He had even stopped talking to his friend. Good, he had obviously heard me. Our cover was safe.

'Well, it's a bit Hotel California, isn't it? How do I know they haven't invited all these people here just to bump us off? What if they've poisoned the canapes to get rid of the competition?'

It seemed like a solid enough conspiracy theory to me; why else would Google invite so many potential competitors to a spa and be so nice to us? But before poor Emma could answer, the man from Google decided to jump in.

'Hey, buddy, ' he asked, in a thick Californian drawl, 'did I just hear you say you think we're gonna kill you?'

His companion - a tall Australian fellow in a suit - piped up as well. 'Well that's ridiculous, mate. That's stupid. What kind of faakin' ridiculous, stupid thing is that to say?' He was clearly a bit pissed, but then so was I, so I could hardly say anything. (Although I was doing a better job on that front than he was.)

'Well, you have to admit, ' I joked, stroking my chin in a sinister fashion. 'It does seem very convenient.'

'That's just ridiculous, ' said the Californian. 'Why would we do that? That's just stupid.' The man was clearly taking my allegations very seriously; there had evidently been a huge irony breakdown somewhere. California, probably.

'Ah, yes, but they laughed at Groucho Marx, ' I pointed out. 'Anyway, can't stop, got to mingle.' I wandered off, chuckling at my joke, in search of some more canapes.

9.2

The next morning, slightly hung-over and, having forgotten to book myself a wake-up call, ten minutes late for David Cameron’s opening speech in which he had promised to lay out his vision for a Britain driven by increasing GWB (General Well Being) rather than GDP, whatever that meant. I ambled up to the reception table to collect my passes to the various events.
‘Hello, ‘ I said to the woman at the desk. ‘Paul Carr, sorry I’m late.

I think you’ve got some tickets for me.’ ‘Ah, yes, Mr Carr. Really glad you could make it – sorry about the mix-up with the speaking schedule. Actually, would you mind waiting for a moment, my boss wanted to have a quick word…’ ‘Of course, no problem at all.’ She probably just wanted to apologise again for cancelling my talk. How nice. But as the head of PR came round the corner, her face a mask of seriousness, I could tell she had something else on her mind. In fact she looked really cross.

Oh God, what had I done? I cast my mind back to the previous night – had I been really drunk? No, I remember getting back to the hotel. The party was too boring for any of that kind of madness.

Had Emma confessed to our booze scam? No, she was a PR. A professional liar.

‘Hi… Paul… er, can we go round here for a quick word?” she asked, guiding me behind a giant ‘Welcome to Google Zeitgeist’ board. ‘It’s just that we’ve had… er… a bit of a complaint from one of our people about you.’

‘A complaint? I’ve only been here twelve hours – what on earth could I have done wrong in that time?’

‘Well, apparently there was a bit of a disagreement last night at the party. Did you tell one of our PR people that you thought we were trying to kill you?’

‘What?! No, of course I didn’t!’

Well, yes, I did.

‘But… oh for goodness sake, are you serious?”

‘Apparently one of our guys was at the bar talking to the CEO of — and they heard you saying you thought we had some sinister ulterior motive.’

Oh, shit, the tall gobby Australian was only the CEO of — a huge financial services company and one of Google’s biggest clients.

Exactly the sort of person you don’t want to overhear someone accusing your company of trying to murder. And the Californian with him was clearly the most humourless prick in the history of the world.

If the look on the head of PR’s face hadn’t been so serious, I’d have laughed out loud. I felt like I was back at school, being hauled up in front of our head of sixth form for sabotaging the headmaster’s microphone on speech day. Trying desperately not to crack a smile as I spoke, I explained the entire situation – the Hotel California joke, the fact that her Californian colleague was a humourless dick.

The fact that the Australian was bizarrely rude.
‘And, anyway, you’d have to be a fucking idiot not to realise I was joking.’

Suddenly I realised she’d been trying not to smile, too. We both failed at the same time. ‘Jesus, ‘ she said. ‘Well, there does seem to have been a – erm – sense of humour failure. So you don’t think we’re trying to kill you?’

‘Absolutely not, ‘ I said.

‘In that case, I suppose I can let you off. And if you have any more trouble from people with no sense of humour, just come and see me. I’m from Ireland – we laugh at everything.’

‘Will do, ‘ I said. ‘Thanks.’

But as I walked away, I had to admit if I had accidentally hit upon a secret plot to kill us all she’d have dealt with it brilliantly. Just to be on the safe side I decided that, at the gala dinner that evening, I’d sit near the door.

9.3

The gala dinner began immediately after the last presentation of the day and if it was designed to impress and overwhelm the guests then it succeeded with knobs on. The weather was abysmal – absolutely pouring with rain – so Google had laid on hundreds of umbrellas (branded, natch) to protect our dinner suits as we snaked behind the hotel and out into the grounds where we were told a marquee had been erected for the dinner. What we saw as we rounded the corner was beyond impressive: it was a marquee in the same way that the Grand Canyon is a pothole – a specially constructed tented village roughly the size of the Millennium Dome. Outside the entrance, protected from the rain inside giant transparent bubbles, were a strange collection of performers – acrobats, contortionists, fire-eaters and the like – laid on to amuse us as we wandered to the first tent where pre-dinner drinks were to be served.

This first tent alone was bigger than the average school playing field and was already packed to the canvas rafters with hundreds of guests, knocking back endless quantities of champagne. Looking around, I wished I’d gone back to my hotel to put on a tie. Even in the new suit and shirt I’d bought specially for the conference, I was easily the most underdressed person in the room. Most of the men were wearing dinner jackets and the women had changed into ball gowns or party dresses.

Across the tent I spotted someone I knew. We had met earlier following David Cameron’s speech – he was a senior manager at eBay and it turned out we had a couple of mutual friends back in London. I shared my Hotel California story with him and he admitted that he’d had similar concerns as to why Google was being so generous to everyone. We agreed that, assuming he made it out alive, he’d pitch the idea to eBay for their next corporate event.

Our brief chat was interrupted by a violin fanfare played by two girls, one of whom looked suspiciously like Vanessa-Mae. Dinner was served.

Walking into the second tent, I realised I didn ‘t have to worry about sitting near the exit: the main dining room was so vast that there were about a dozen different entrances and exits. I found the nearest table with an empty place and sat down, introducing myself to my fellow diners.

‘ I’m sorry, ‘ said one, interrupting me in broken English, ‘we are Dutch, we have not the best English. But is nice to meet you.’ Apparently they did something to do with marketing. The meal flew by.

After dinner – a four-course feast, punctuated by speeches from various Google luminaries, each of whom was even more delighted than the last to see that so many of us had made it – we were ushered back into the first tent for dancing to the music of Jim Noir, a Manchester-based singer-songwriter who, we were assured, was going to be The Next Big Thing. The fact that his record company was sponsoring the event was entirely coincidental. Apparently one of his songs had featured on an advert for Ginsters’ pies earlier in the year. I headed back to the free bar.
‘You look as bored as I feel, ‘ came a voice from behind me.

I turned round to see an older lady – perhaps in her late fifties, but dressed as if she was twenty years younger, always a bold decision. She introduced herself and explained that she was in charge of content for a certain giant company’s consumer website. This was a huge stroke of luck: the company was one I’d been trying to woo for ages. They had invested a fortune in this amazing site, full of news and entertainment content, but it was – by and large – utter dreck. Finally! I thought: an opportunity for some networking. If I play this right – turn on the old charm, flirt a bit with the old girl – I can swing a bit of moonlighting writing some better stuff for them. The nice thing about writing stuff for big corporations who treat ‘content’ as a commodity is that they often pay an absolute fortune for fresh words, and it’s dead easy work because no one ever actually reads any of it.

‘Bored? No I’m having a ball,’ I said. ‘Apparently this guy used to advertise Ginsters’ pies. We’re in the presence of greatness. Can I buy you a drink?’

‘ Isn’t it a free bar?’

‘Yes, ‘ I admitted, ‘but it’s the thought that counts, right?’ ‘I suppose so. So, what brings you here… ?’

I rattled off my CV in an only slightly gilded nutshell and my new friend seemed suitably impressed by what I ‘d pretended to have achieved. She also nodded enthusiastically at the ideas I threw out for features she should add to the portal, even the one about a fake agony aunt.

‘ We should definitely chat further, ‘ she said, handing me her card. Being the world’s worst networker, I didn’t have a card, so I scribbled my email address on a cocktail napkin. Classy.

‘ Definitely, ‘ I agreed. ‘Anyway, I’d better get back to my hotel. Early start tomorrow.’ Karl was joining me for the second day and I’d agreed to meet him for breakfast in a few hours.
‘Where are you staying?’ she asked.

‘ The hotel up the road. They downgraded me to the one with all the plebs.’

‘Oh, I’m staying there, too, ‘ she said.

‘Oh. Oops.’

‘No problem, let’s share a cab back…’, Google had laid on a fleet of black people carriers to deliver us safely home, ‘…then you can buy me a proper drink and tell me more about your ideas for the site.’

‘Sounds good to me.’

9.4

Arriving back at the hotel, my new friend went to reception to collect her suitcase which had been delivered during the day. ‘You couldn’t help me take this up to my room, could you? I’ve slightly over-packed.’

She wasn’t kidding; the bag was bigger than the dinner marquee.

‘Sure. Of course.’ Extra brownie points, thought I.

Now, had this woman been half the age she was, and were I not a total fucking idiot, I would have sworn I was being chatted up. ‘Buy me a drink.’ ‘Come up to my room.’ It couldn’t have been more obvious if she’d hit me over the head with a club. But this was a fifty-something-year-old woman in a business suit; in charge of running a huge corporate website. She was also, judging by the ring on her finger, married.

I wheeled the bag into her room (It had wheels! Who needs help with a bag with wheels?) and she closed the door behind her.

‘Well, ‘ I said, suddenly very aware of how small her room was, with inches between the door and the bed, and very little space anywhere else. ‘I really had better get going. Early start.’

‘What about that drink?’ she asked.

‘Actually, I’m pretty knackered. And I was quite drunk last night. If I show up hung-over for the second morning in a row they’re going to think they’ve accidentally invited Oliver Reed.’

‘Okay, well, if not a drink, how about this…’

With those words, this fifty-whatever-year-old woman – this fifty-whatever-year-old married woman who I’d spent the evening flirting with trying to convince her to let me write crap for her website – lunged at me. And I mean lunged, like a teenager on a park bench.

I should make one thing absolutely clear: I am in no way proud of what I did in response. I side-stepped out of her way. Literally dived to one side; the poor woman almost hit her nose on the wall. At her age, she could easily have broken a hip.

‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea, ‘ I said, turning on my heel and almost sprinting out of the door. As the lift doors closed I could just make out her last words…

‘Call me…’

Regaling Karl with this story the next morning over breakfast, I could tell he didn’t believe me. ‘Jesus, she must have been pretty hideous for you to turn her down, ‘ he said, smirking.

‘That’s a little harsh. I have my standards.’

‘No you don’t. And you definitely don’t when you’re drunk’

‘I wasn’t bloody drunk – and I’ll have you know I’m extremely picky. And she was at least thirty years older than me.’

‘Oh come on, ‘ he scoffed. ‘How old was Nina?’

Nina was a journalist I’d dated briefly when I was twenty-four and, yes, admittedly, she was fifteen years older than me. And, yes, admittedly, she’d written a column about our relationship in a certain woman’s magazine in which she referred to me as ‘the man cub’.

‘But that’s not the point. Everyone knows the rule on age gaps is half your age plus seven. Half of thirty-nine is nineteen and a half. Plus seven is…’

‘Twenty-six and a half, ‘ Karl interrupted. ‘And you were twenty-four. So Nina was too old for you as well. And yet…’

‘Yes, all right. But that was different. I fancied Nina. The woman last night was just… old…’

But Karl wasn’t listening to me any more. He’d spotted someone he knew walking behind us.

‘Hello!’ said Karl, raising his voice in surprise as if he was greeting an old friend.

‘Hello, ‘ said the voice I recognised from somewhere, but couldn’t place. I turned around to see who it was, but he was already walking away. You could have knocked me down with a feather.

‘Wow! I didn’t know you knew Peter Gabriel. You’re a dark horse.’

But by this point Karl was just looking stunned, and slightly sheepish. And then he burst out laughing.

‘I don’t, ‘ he said. ‘I just looked up and made eye contact and knew I recognised him from somewhere. Before I knew what was happening, I was saying hello.’

‘You just accidentally greeted Peter Gabriel, like an old friend.’

‘I suppose I did, yes.’

And, of course, Peter Gabriel did what any of us would do in that situation – assumed that he and Karl must have met before and greeted him in kind.

Now that’s how networking should be done, I thought.

9.5

The last big event of the conference was the real crowd-puller – a’fireside chat’ with Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google. The fireside chat is a hideous American invention and basically refers to an informal speech, often with a moderator on hand to pitch questions and filter them from the audience. Despite the name, it’s very rare for an actual fire to be involved – just a couple of chairs and a couple of microphones – and, in this case, several TV cameras.

The presence of the cameras struck me as odd. The media had largely been banned from the event, with only a few select reporters being allowed in, on the strict understanding that none of the goings-on could be reported. What happens at Zeitgeist stays at Zeitgeist.((Oops.)) There was also a definite buzz in the room, the sense that something was about to happen – a surprise of some kind.

And what a surprise it was.

Just as the last few people were taking their seats, the announcement came: Eric Schmidt would be joined in his fireside chat by none other than Google co-founder and Internet legend Larry Page! The crowd burst into spontaneous applause.

You have to understand that in this room – a room that had for the last couple of days hosted presentations by David Cameron, Peter Gabriel and all manner of multi-millionaire founders of international companies – Larry Page was the nearest thing to a real rock-star they could imagine.

Forget David Beckham and Posh Spice. This guy was A list.

9.6

Larry Page was a student at Stanford in the mid-1990s when he first met his future business partner Sergey Brin. Both were computer science majors and started working together on a research project to demonstrate that the way most search engines rated the websites they searched was fatally flawed – and to find a way to fix them.

At that time, most of the popular search tools worked in the same way: by ranking search results by how many times a particular word or phrase being searched for appeared on any given site. So, if a user was searching for ‘donkey porn’, then the first result shown would be the site that featured the most instances of those words.

For Internet spammers, fooling search sites into showing their site first was a simple matter of including as many popular words and phrases on each page as they could. This was rarely the best way to ensure high-quality content for the end user, but it was the best anyone could think of.

What Page and Brin proposed was a system that supplemented keyword matching with a system that ranked websites by how many other sites linked to them. The more useful or important a site was – they theorised – the more inbound links the site would attract from other sites. But then they went one step further – looking at the sites that linked to the other sites and counting how many inbound links they had from still other sites. The key to a top ranking would be to get lots of inbound links from sites that were themselves linked to by other important sites. They developed a demonstration version of their system as part of the Stanford website, christening it ‘Backrub’. By 1997, their fledgling search engine was growing at such a rapid pace that they decided to launch it as a stand-alone site, under a brand new name.

The story of the name they ended up choosing is a funny one. One September afternoon, Larry Page sat in his office in the Gates Computer Science Building (named after Bill Gates, who had paid for the facility to be built) at Stanford, brainstorming new names. With him were Sergey Brin and their friend Sean Anderson, another computer science student. The three were each firing out possible names which Larry wrote on a large whiteboard while Sean searched the web to see whether anyone else was already using them. ‘How about we call it “Googolplex”?’ suggested Anderson. A ‘googol’ is a number equal to writing ‘1′ with a hundred zeroes after it. An extraordinarily large number, in other words. A ‘googolplex’ is a 1 with a googol zeroes after it. An extraordinary large number, to the power of extraordinary. Anderson suggested that calling the site ‘Googolplex’ would show that their new search engine was able to search an almost infinite number of pages. An impressive number for an impressive site. What it also showed was that they were a bunch of nerds.

In the end, Page thought Googolplex was too much of a mouthful and suggested ‘Googol’. And so it would have been had Sean been as much of a speller as he was a nerd. What he actually searched for, and the name that was later registered, was spelt ‘Google’. And so a legend was born.

In 2001, Google recruited Eric Schmidt, formerly CEO of software company Novell, ostensibly as CEO but really to act as a sensible business head to balance out the youthful exuberance and geekery of Page and Brin. Clearly the plan worked – by 2004 Google was a publicly traded company, valued at $23 billion, and by the start of 2008 it would have grown to over twenty thousand employees, many of whom would be based at the company’s main headquarters in Mountain View, California – in a building known as The Googleplex.
9.7

Having a fireside chat with Eric Schmidt to close the conference was more than enough to draw media attention, but scoring Larry Page as well was something else. If Schmidt was Google’s Commissioner Gordon, Page was its Batman. No wonder the cameras were jostling for position as the room began to fill to the rafters; standing room only.

The chat got under way with Schmidt and Page talking about the future of Google and fielding questions from the floor. It was all pretty standard stuff – Eric Schmidt made sure of that. What was remarkable was watching how Schmidt abruptly silenced Page when his young charge nearly revealed something commercially sensitive.

One such moment came when an audience member cheekily asked what innovation was coming next from Google. Larry started to answer.
‘Well, that’s an interesting question! We’re…’

‘ Actually, I don’t think Larry is going to answer that…’ interrupted Schmidt.

The entire room groaned. Page looked suitably chastised and moved on to the next question.

Watching the excitement of Larry Page – constantly innovating and always excited to share his latest plan with the people he regarded as his peers – and the firm hand of Eric Schmidt – all too aware that every utterance from billionaire Page had the potential to rock the share price of this corporate behemoth – you couldn’t help but see why the company had grown so big and yet remained so innovative. They were like the ultimate power threesome, with Brin at that moment staying behind in California to look after the kids. All twenty thousand of them.

In fact, Schmidt’s role as Google’s father figure goes even deeper than chaperoning press conferences. In 2006 a story did the rounds in dot com circles about a row between Page and Brin over which size beds they would have in one of their jets (the same jet, incidentally, was also fitted with hammocks for use during parties). When the two couldn’t agree, and the row threatened to damage their working relationship, it was Schmidt who had stepped in to resolve things…

According to reports, he took both Brin and Page into a room and scolded them for their squabbling. ‘Sergey, you can have whatever bed you want in your room; Larry, you can have whatever kind of bed you want in your bedroom. Let’s move on.’ And so they did.

Another telling point during the fireside chat came when the pair were asked about the recent launch of Google in China. The decision had caused huge controversy in the Internet community: China has some of the most aggressive censorship laws in the world, with journalists routinely being jailed for exercising what in the West would be considered basic freedom of speech. In order to get permission to operate in this huge emerging market, Google had agreed to filter its search results to fit in with China’s own censorship of the Internet (known to what pass for wags in the web press as ‘the great firewall of China’). As a result, if you search for ‘Tiananmen’ on Google in China you get lots of sites filled with pretty pictures of the Beijing tourist attraction. Do the same in the West and it’s tanks and massacres all the way. An audience member asked them how this policy squared with Google’s official mission statement: ‘Don’t be evil’. The answer spoke volumes about how far Google had come from dorm room to boardroom as the two men compared the situation to how German law insisted that Google restrict access to Nazi-related websites. In the same way, they had to abide by the Chinese government’s preferences to operate in that country.

‘Godwin’s Law, ‘ whispered a man behind me to his friend.

‘Yeah, ‘ his friend whispered back.

Godwin’s Law was first coined in 1990 by the American attorney and author Mike Godwin. It reads: ‘As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.’ Or in other words, eventually in every discussion on the Internet, some idiot makes a comparison to Nazism. The law has spawned a variation which could be more appropriate in this case… In any Internet argument, the first person to mention the Nazis automatically loses.

It was time to go home.

9.8

Having generously decided not to kill us after all (for this year at least), Google had laid on another fleet of people carriers to take all the Zeitgeist guests back to London.

Each car seated about five or six people, giving passengers one last opportunity for networking on the hour-long journey back to the city. Unfortunately, no one was going the same way as Karl and me so, as we sat waiting for the off, we had an entire cab to ourselves. Until, that is, seconds before the driver slammed the door shut, a smartly dressed woman came running out of the hotel, clearly relieved not to have missed her ride home. She dived in the back of the cab, out of breath, throwing a gigantic handbag on to the seat beside Karl. It was only after she recovered from her sprint that she realised – I realised – that we’d met before.

‘ Hello, ‘ said Karl. ‘I’m Karl…’

‘Hello, ‘ said the woman for the previous night. I stared out of the window.

It was going to be a very, very long journey home.

Chapter Ten: ‘Nice colour…
…That’s Bone’…