HOWZAT

These are ideas that have been bandied about since the internet was in its infancy. But with a series of giant supercomputers powering its searches and related services Google hopes it can bring these ideas into the everyday.

Books, newspapers and magazines would be things of the past if Google had its way.

If all published material were digitised and stored by Google, anything written by any author anywhere in the world could be downloaded and read at any time. The same goes for scholarly theses, school curriculums, training manuals and bluprints. Students from Southend to Somalia could study together in a forum where class size would be no problem.

Once a student has downloaded a curriculum or textbook he or she would need a word processor or a spreadsheet program to do their homework.

But Microsoft Word and Excel are expensive. Enter Google once more. The company has recently put its own word processor and spreadsheet program online that anyone with an internet connection can use for free.

All these ideas have Bill Gates, the Microsoft chief, Yahoo and countless other high-tech and software companies squirming as the Google juggernaut gathers speed on the information superhighway.

Talking of highways, if you have ever been stuck outside a rainy pub on a Saturday night in need of a cab, Google’s latest invention is for you.

The company is testing a mobile tracking device that will help to find a vacant taxi, the right night bus, or indeed the appropriate Tube train or tram to take you home.

These are just a tiny proportion of the ideas being mulled over inside the Googleplex. The Mountain View campus is an astonishing place. The atmosphere of intellectual discussion and invention, the quiet hum of all those brains, makes one think of a university in Renaissance Florence, or 15th- century Rotterdam. The chief difference is that the Googleplex seems to be populated by several thousand Star Trek conventioneers.

The company has created a café society with dozens of outdoor tables where nutritious vegetarian and organic food is served free around the clock. Clutches of young Indian men earnestly sip fruit and vegetable cocktails, locked in debate about whichever of the life-changing ideas they happen to be working on. Inside, young people in student garb sit in massage chairs or on exercise bikes or stand around pool tables; one even plays the piano. All of them, the company insists, are deep in thought. There is a free laundry, several dry-cleaning drop-off boxes, even an onsite mechanic. The mundane is taken care of so the Google boffins can concentrate on their inventions.

Louis Monier, the founder of the former Google rival Alta Vista and the godfather of internet search engines, can be found wandering around the corridors, rubbing his beard in professorial contemplation.

“We need to keep thinking up ideas to make people want to use Google instead of using Yahoo! or MSN or another search engine,” he said. Mr Holzle, who also resembles a college professor, agrees — but he has a grander vision for Google.

“I see in the future that the massive global community that the web inevitably creates will break down all borders,” he said with a true zealot’s quiet intensity.

“National borders, ideological borders, technological borders and so on. The internet will bring about great things for the world and for people.”

Click here for comment on this story in Mousetrap, the Times Online technology weblog

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