During his recent interview with David Rubenstein, co-founder of The Carlyle Group and host of the self-titled show on YouTube, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai revealed the early years of his career. The IIT Kharagpur grad who joined the company in 2004 became its CEO in 2014 and steered the search engine giant through its tumultuous phase of embracing AI to stay ahead of the competition. Despite pioneering several AI and ML advancements with early investments in the field with its dedicated Google DeepMind, the company lagged behind. Nonetheless after several thousands of layoffs, and a botched up launch of Bard AI, Google clawed back resiliently and allayed fears of its most popular product getting obliterated to AI – the Google Search! What is interesting is that the company wasn’t the search giant yet when Pichai joined, even as Yahoo and a bunch of competitors shared the largest chunk of market share. Yet somehow Pichai was fascinated with the startup. In 2004 the company was growing faster with over 1000 employees. When asked what attracted him to a the-then “small little search engine company?” Pichai quipped that he “was using the product from the outside.” “I clearly noticed how much better it was as a product,” he added. He described himself as a “power user” of search even before stepping into Google’s office for his interview. Pichai remarked that he “had a lot of ideas,” in his head on “how the product could be made better.” He emphasized how “gaining access to technology” made a big difference in his life.
Sundar Pichai further remarked on the “power of giving access to technology,” citing the example of Google that appealed to everyone. He said, “
Launched in 1997, Google Search Engine’s prototype was first released two years earlier in 1995. Throughout its two- decades of existence the search engine underwent several algorithmic updates. In 2024 Google rolled out AI overviews also known as the Search Generative Experience (SGE), to thwart the competition by generative AI technologies like the ChatGPT by OpenAI. However, the AI overviews have landed the search engine in soup in more than just a singular occasion forcing the company to tweak the feature.
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