The Evening Standard (London), June 27, 2007, Wednesday

Copyright 2007 Associated Newspapers Ltd.

All Rights Reserved

The Evening Standard (London)

June 27, 2007 Wednesday

SECTION: A; Pg. 28

HEADLINE: The man who makes Google click in London;

The web giant's UK chief sees nothing sinister in its relentless onward drive, even though it leaves some people cold

BYLINE: CHRIS BLACKHURST

BODY:

AS I WRITE this, mid-morning, I check. I've already used Google more than 10 times today. Is there any other product quite like it, anything so ubiquitous, so taken for granted? There's the phone, but I can switch the network. Petrol? I never bother with the brand. Milk? Don't look at the name, just the sell-by date.

No, in the end, I come down to water.

Yes, I know there are other search engines but, sorry Yahoo and the rest, like many people on the planet, Google has got me in a vice-like grip. I never even think about using it. When I look at my home page, it's there, the famous coloured moniker. There are no ifs and buts about it Google is part of my life.

So, to be Dennis Woodside, the boss of Google in the UK and Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands (in true Google fashion, they have their own quirky way of dividing up the world) must be quite something. I'm sitting in reception at the Google offices sorry, that's GooglePlex in Google-speak waiting for him to arrive.

The headquarters are opposite the Telegraph building in Victoria. At Christmas and at other times in the year, they put messages up in the window Happy Christmas and the other side reciprocates. It's like how they used to send greetings to each other on the Somme. New media versus old media. Sweet.

The big man arrives, and I don't know what I was expecting but he doesn't look at all geeky. Well, a little, in an earnest, keen way. He's casually dressed in a bright shirt, at home with the vivid blues, greens, reds and yellows of the surroundings.

He wants to take me on a tour. The offices are what I imagined them to be. Each area of the business is themed, so in finance, the staff who service the banks and other money companies that pour millions into Google, in return for internet users clicking on their sites, have their desks adorned with posters of £20 notes.

In marketing, they've gone for a gardening look while in human resources, their section resembles a nightclub.

There's an engineering division that is full of bits of circuit boards, terminal parts and wires.

Woodside's got a friendly word for everyone. Nobody is missed out. We go into a room that has the feel of a sixth-form common room, with easy chairs and table football.

Everywhere, though, is quiet. Partly, it's the fact, he explains, that a lot of their business is done on email phones are so old technology. Also, it's because today there's a company outing to see Shrek 3, and some have gone ahead. When Woodside's finished with me, that's where he's going. He was born in 1969, in Pennsylvania.

His father was a businessman, his mother a research scientist. "She worked on the team that discovered hepatitis B. Her boss got the Nobel Prize. She caught hepatitis B when she was researching it." Was she okay, I ask, thinking of the iniquity of the heroine who got the disease as part of her job but not the world-beating gong. "Yes, she was fine." Phew. I make a mental note to look up the scientist on Google. His name was Baruch Blumberg, Google later tells me in seconds. Woodside went to Cornell, where he studied economics and labour relations.

He also rowed for the university. From there, he journeyed to the West Coast, to Stanford, to read law. Then he headed back east, to work for a federal judge in New York. After that, he returned west to join a law firm in California.

Then came McKinsey. It was 1998, during "the early internet years", he says, sounding as though he's referring to a period from ancient history. It was also the summer that two students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, used algorithms to devise a method of measuring how often a web page was accessed from other web pages. T

TODAY, that unique concept since copied by all their rivals has propelled their company, which they called Google, to a value of £80 billion.

It's now the most powerful brand in the world, based on financial muscle and popularity with consumers (Vodafone, Britain's number one, is a lowly 22nd).

"We got a call to go to Google. I didn't think it was that interesting to be honest," says Woodside, smiling at how mad he was. "They wanted us to help them think about the future." He went, developed a strategy group for Page and Brin, and has been there ever since. He ran the emerging markets of Eastern Europe, Russia, the Middle East. Late last year, he came here. "I love London, love the job, it's a great city, a fantastic place in which to live." He's living in Kensington with his wife Laura (also ex-McKinsey) and their two children, aged six and four. He keeps fit by doing triathlons and running marathons. In the Google firmament, the UK ranks fourth or fifth in terms of size.

Last year, Google's revenues were $10.6 billion (£5.3 billion), of which $1.6 billion or 15.1% came from the UK. In the first quarter of this year, worldwide earnings were $3.66 billion with $578 million or 15.7% from here. So the importance is growing. Woodside says he is impressed with what he's found here. "The British are phenomenal adapters and embracers of the internet more so than my US colleagues. There are so many start-ups here where people have really succeeded.

"They may not have the size of the businesses in California but they're just as successful in their own way." He rattles off a list of UK dot-coms to prove his point. "They're all phenomenally successful internet businesses," he says.

I realise that I have never used any of them. I also tend not to use the word phenomenal. But then I'm not the boss of Google, not the head of a phenomenon.

He tells how they needed a wetsuit for his son aged six. "There was nowhere in London we knew of, so we looked it up on Google. There was a stack online and we got one from Cornwall." His son must think he's a wizard, that he runs the magic kingdom. But putting childish wonderment aside, I say that not everyone is appreciative of Google. For instance, its relentless onward drive, where the company seems determined to have its own piece of everything, leaves some people cold.

The recent "Big Brother" row, where Google is setting out to create the most comprehensive database of personal information ever assembled, is a case in point.

"We take privacy very seriously, we're pretty transparent with our policies," says Woodside.

"We want you to use your search history to help you improve." If this sounds creepily Orwellian, he maintains not.

"It's about helping you. It's the searchers who are leading us down this path.

They want us to communicate more with them." So, he says, you're in a part of town and you want somewhere to eat. Google knows you like Chinese so it tells you, on your mobile, where there's a Chinese, and it shows you how to get there.

It's not sinister, Woodside says. "We have an obligation to be clear about what we do and how we're using the information we receive. That's not just us that's everybody involved in the internet. If you search, we will know your name and your IP address but we won't know your address and your age and so on. We won't know any of that." Google wants to hoover the lot, I say look at books, where it is aiming to digitalise virtually every title ever printed. Bookshops and libraries will become obsolete, and they and their fans are not happy about that.

'The British phenomenal adapters embracers the internet'

He nods. "When books fall out of copyright, they are in the public domain, so there's no problem there.

When they're in copyright, that's different, but many publishers have come round they want to participate in the programme." He cites how in Russia, the inhabitants of Siberia, thousands of miles from Moscow, were denied access to the vast state library until Google came along. Good old Google.

It's simply not true, he says, that Google sets out to cover all the bases before everyone else. "We're not like that, we stick with our core and we follow what our users want." Another bugbear, click fraud (someone clicks away, thus causing the advertiser to run up a hefty bill), he insists, is being dealt with. "Click fraud is in the low single digits of clicks where we detect it we will refund the advertiser." What gives him nightmares? Quick as a Google search, he replies: "Two guys in a garage who come up with a better search operation. Facebook was a 23- year-old Harvard student who within 18 months had a $50 million business worldwide." To that end, he says, Google is working constantly to stay ahead, to hone its services, to encourage its own staff to come forward with proposals.

"We don't believe in hierarchy. We want ideas to bubble up from within the company," says Woodside. He looks at his watch. He's got Shrek to go to.

LIFE AND TIMES OF DENNIS WOODSIDE

BORN: 1969 EDUCATION: Cornell, Stanford universities FIRST JOB: assisting a federal judge in New York KEY CAREER MOVES: joined McKinsey; helped Google set up strategy group, ran Russia, Eastern Europe and Middle East, in charge of UK and Ireland from 2006 HOBBIES: ski-ing, running marathons, triathlons LIFE AND TIMES OF DENNIS WOODSIDE

Email: chris.blackhurst@standard.co.uk

GRAPHIC: Important to be earnest: Dennis Woodside has a friendly word for everyone and he also loves London