For a company whose distinctive logo and search engine have become so central to the lives we lead on the internet, the real-life Google - at least as it materialises in London - is surprisingly difficult to find.

Indeed, slipping down a narrow, rain-drenched side street off the sprawling chaos that is Charing Cross Road - for a scheduled interview at Google's European headquarters - feels a bit like trying to track down a secretive hedge fund.

Except that, unlike a hedge fund, there isn't even a brass nameplate on the wall outside the company's front door.

In Google's case, there is no indication that, behind the imposing grey security gate down this central London hideaway, lies quite possibly the most successful media and technology phenomenon to emerge in a generation - and with a cool market value of nearly $57 billion to boot.

It would appear that, outside of cyberspace, you can only find Google if you know where to look.

Once inside, of course, the picture is dramatically different. The primary colours of Google's distinctive logo bedeck the walls as examples of the search engine's ever-changing themed home page. And a small legion of casually dressed young Googlers beaver away at computer screens and on other research projects.

The combined effect is slightly confusing - on the one hand it feels like a throwback to a halycon dot-com era; on the other it feels as if I should be dropping off my young children here for their first day at a new nursery.

But then the modern Google is a confusing beast - at once "cool" but also commercially ruthless.

And at the heart of the quietly productive hum that is Google in London is Nikesh Arora, the urbane former T-Mobile executive who - as vice-president of European operations - is the de facto point man for the company's strategic and development plans across the continent and in the Middle East and Africa.

As you would expect, Mr Arora - dressed casually, in a suit but without a tie - is expansive, idealistic, informed and enthusiastic about all things internet and all things Google. He talks gushingly about the democratising power of the web and - after a while - provides a succinct definition of both what it, and Google, mean.

The internet, he says, is "a fantastic interactive medium that allows, literally, every individual to become a publisher, every individual to become a consumer of what they want in their own personalised way.

"To a bigger end, the internet is basically trading in a more global, connected society. It's eliminating the information advantage because everybody has the same information and access to it. And it is feeding our need as a society for instant gratification."

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