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eric schmidt: the governor ofvirginia is the clearest thinking politiciani have met. [applause] eric schmidt: with well-thoughtwords, he articulates a visionof a great state. and he does it with the energy,which we've worked with him for a while on. so for example, he decides thatall of the information that's publicly available invirginia needs to be available
to its citizens. so he invents with us somethingcalled sitemaps. and all of a sudden, all thatinformation that could not be available before is now available to everyone worldwide. we've now replicated thatin ten other states. an example where the governor,his vision, our teams, make something happen. and now everyone elseis scrambling.
this is also a governor-- one more plug for thisgovernor-- this is the only governor i've ever met whoactually cares about outcomes. eric schmidt: i mean, i thinkmost of you would agree to me that outcomes are actuallywhat you should be judged against. but apparently notin normal government. but a virginia we'vegot the leadership. and that's why the state isdoing so very, very well. to me, virginia is an upcomingleader globally.
i was sort of studying this. and i was looking at uva andthe college of william mary are now ranked among the toppublic universities. uva, william and mary,virginia tech, mary washington, and james madisonamong the top 25 best values for education. i used to play footballagainst thomas jefferson high school. and i'm quite concerned thatthey were ranked number one
among public high schoolsin the nation. isn't that phenomenal? we used to beat themby the way. my point here is there'ssomething afoot here with the consensus that has beenbuilt in this state. and i think, to some degree, thesuccess also marries the success of the internet. the internet, of course, isthis phenomenal thing that's going on.
there are somewhere around 1.3billion users on the order of 200 million users being addedon a yearly basis. the internet is this phenomenonthat will define essentially the rest of ourlives, and our children's lives, and our grandchildren'slives, and so forth and so on. and a lot it in our case isoccurring because of things called moore's law. moore's law meansthat everything doubles every 18 months.
there's a lesser known lawcalled kryder's law, which says the data storage doublesevery 12 months, which is why you have this enormous amountof crap on your computer. [laughter] eric schmidt: the drivesjust get bigger, and bigger, and bigger. and so if you think about it,if you just sort of do the math a little bit, let me giveyou an example of a problem. by the year 2019, it's goingto be possible to have an
ipod-like device that will have85 years of video on it. so you will be dead before youwatch the whole thing. does this cause anystress here? i am really quite upsetabout this. i intend to be alive n 2019. and i've already consumed awhole bunch of those 85 years. it's a very serious issue. and this rate of connectivity,the rate of innovation is not slowing.
people tend to underestimatewhat can be done with these things. because it compounds, and itcompounds, and it compounds just as the success of theinvestment in education is going on here in virginia. it's a compounding. the investments that were made70 years ago to create vpi as a land-grant university wherei was fortunate to grow up. and we have the presidentof the university here.
it compounds now. now all of a sudden, they'rebusy looking at this interesting new biotechmaneuver, which nobody ever thought about when itwas going to be an agricultural school. but the quality of the facultyis so good now that they can actually expand. and the governor and hisprograms are consistent with the funding that they need.
so that's how thesethings work. now, by the way, it's onlygoing to get worse. because the rate at whichpeople are, for example, blogging, there are like70 million blogs. it's frightening. every day eight hours of video,actually every minute eight hours of video isuploaded to youtube. by the way, most of itis kind of iffy. so don't worry.
but some of it isextraordinary. pictures of people families, butthere are amazing things going on there as well. so it is this new phenomenon. there are more than 10,000applications that have been built on top of facebook. there are more than 20,000igoogle applications which are part of the way google works. this phenomena is nowextending, and
it's extending globally. google started with25,000 web pages. we now have tens of billions. so again, the growingcontinues. you'll never read it all. you'll never get it all. it's only going to continue. and we're undergoing thisinteresting shift from the shift where you have yourcomputer and you have
everything on it, to keepingeverything on the net. so one of my literally peoplei grew up with, was running admissions for virginia tech. and one of the things that shewas very proud of is that they put an online form. so you would apply onlinewithout any hard copy. a simple thing, huge improvementin terms of outcomes and so forth andso on, a simple idea. there are many, many examplesof how in this new model the
services that universities andgovernments provide can be provided on any device forany particular reason. so this shift isjust beginning. it's always hard to put yourselfin the mind of a college student, partlybecause it's a little frightening. i want you all to think aboutthe world of a college student today and how theyperceive things. i was quite alarmed.
we hire lots of peopleright out of college. and i asked people,how many of you have a land line telephone? i bet you if i ask thisgroup it's 99%. there's one person herewho doesn't have one. 95% did not. i said, how can you possiblyoperate without a land line? they say, why would we haveto have an extra phone? again, it's a simpleexample of the gap.
and for all of you who manage,lead, teach, getting inside their minds and understandingsuch a simple observation is fundamental. it's a completely differentway of living. in fact, the statistics are that42% of users 18-29 are going to use the internet astheir primary news source for the '08 presidential election. it's a little frightening. and by the way, those peopleare going to vote too.
so all of a sudden this onlineshift changes the world view. there are lots and lots ofinteresting statistics. 45% of college students whowants series television-- you know, the sort ofseries of episodes-- watch them online. you can imagine what that doesto the advertisers on the traditional mechanisms. 30% ofusers in the same age group use a video sharingsite every day. again, watch them.
you'll see it's verydifferent. now, when you think about it asan educator, the world is very, very different. so when i was in seventh gradein montgomery county-- and i assume that you still havea requirement in virginia to study virginia inseventh grade-- we had to memorizethe names of all the counties of virginia. and i succeeded.
i tell you that story to think,why did i need to know that now that i have google. eric schmidt: which one ofyou made me do this? eric schmidt: can't ijust look it up now? a more serious point is do youremember the whole thing with the sats and how they weren'tgoing to let you use calculators at the sats? it's a huge crisis. because, of course, people haveto be able to do math,
and use pencils, andso forth and so on. now you're required touse a calculator. interesting. so we have evidence thateducation shifts based on the world view of the studentand the things which are accessible to them. my central thesis here is thatwe, all of us, have not shifted sufficiently at the rateof change that is going on, which, i think, is the
fundamental message for education. all of us have toanticipate that. so another example is that wehire lots of young people. they're more collaborativethan my generation was. they're used to working inteams. so if your model as a professor is a single studentdoing his or her research, working in the lab lonelylate at night, you've got the wrong model. the new model is teams. and bythe way, not just teams in the
lab, teams across the world. people who have researchrelationships with people they haven't even met, that'snormal now. and we need to teachit that way. so this notion of collaborativeand collaborative learning is, infact, how people will get to the next level. going back to the governor'sinitiative around getting virginia to be number one--
my goal too-- it's going to take this shift. we're going to have to thinkit through and figure out a way to get there. now when you make theinformation that you have available, you're going to haveto make it available to the students. what do the students do? they're on video games.
they're on iphones. they're on ipods. they're on so forth. you're going to have to finda way to get it to them. because that's how they wantto consume information. and they're ultimatelythe customer. an example is old dominionuniversity, which is a really, really sharp group, launchedtheir own youtube channel with putting course content on it.
and the resolution is okand so forth and so on. but given the complexity ofstudents' lives, it really has served them very, very well. there's something called itunesu, which i think is fascinating, where basicallypeople are now putting lectures and campus speechesfrom famous people all around the united states,another example. berkeley and youtube aredoing something similar with their core work.
google book search, and youall have heard about this. we're busy indexing and makinguseful copies of all the books that are in people's librariesaround the world. so you can look them up. and you sit there and say, well,who really cares about the manuscript in 1880. what happens is, it's3:00 in the morning. it's snowing. the library is closed becausestudents aren't real good with
their time management, right? not news to you guys. and all of a suddenthe key insight is right in front of them. you want to talk about having animpact on somebody, that's when you have the impact, whenthey're stuck, when they needed that thing. and all of a sudden it's thereand it has huge implications for what they learn andhow they operate.
in the 16th century, henryviii dissolved the monastic libraries. and there are only 538manuscripts of this time. so we have another group thatis busy basically digitizing and putting them all online. because they have the majorityof the english history from the six to the 15th century. and people can just touch it. they can look at it right now.
again, think about thedifference between when we grew up having to goto the library. [unintelligible] wasn't there, and you have towait, and so forth and so on. and now it's all right there. it changes the way you think. it changes the immediacyof decision making. and it changes the depthof one's learning. i want the studentsto do that.
because the challenges they'regoing to face 20 and 30 years from now are going to requirethat level of knowledge, that require that level ofsophistication as the world gets even more interesting. so when i think aboutall of this, i'll give you another example. there's another professor, thisguy named jerome burg has created a web site calledgoogle lit trips. and what he does is he usesgoogle earth and google maps.
and if you haven't played withthem, they are phenomenal. and he actually goes throughhomer's odyssey on the map with pictures and music. so here you've got somebodywho says, crap. i can't deal withhomer's odyssey. the guy's been deadfor 2,000 years. or is it 3,000? all of sudden you now have away to reach that student. but the way, that student wasme, and maybe some of you to
be honest. voltaire's candide, steinbeck'sgrapes of wrath, all of these things, in factwe have projects in the company where we'll look ata whole document and then produce a map of the book, allthe places in the book, all of the documents, everythingthat's referred to, and building a global mapof where you are. so ok, fine. you don't really wantto read the book.
at least you can navigatethrough where the book takes you so you can get a sense ofwhat it's about, and get excited about it, and maybelearn something that way. it's all about learninghowever you can, whatever it takes. if it's a traditional mechanism,or a youtube video, or a book, any of thoseare fine as long as we ultimately win. and the outcome we want isknowledge and insight.
that's what we're going for. that's what we carea lot about. so the principle here isthat we as a group have to do four things. we have to adapt. we have to adapt to the factthat this internet phenomena that i'm talking aboutis getting bigger. and i told you the math. do it in your head.
remember doubling every 18months is a factor of ten and five, and a factorof 110 years. 100 times faster, 100 times moreinformation, 100 times more complexity in ten years. ten years happens pretty fastwhen you're an adult. now all of a sudden, it'sgoing to happen now. we need to get organizedabout that. the second thing isthat we have to learn from the students.
everybody here knows you havethe sharpest students and you have the ok students. the sharpest students willshow how they learn. they can teach us. and every one of them that i'vetalked with uses every device i just described. they literally take it all in. they all put it together. they have a map in their headof how they learn, and they
just do it. we have to grow the knowledgebase about how to do this. here in this room we havethe leaders of higher education in virginia. you guys are in charge. but you also manage a very largeset of people who are not in this audience. how are they going toget this message? how are they going to learn?
how are they going to grow? how are they going to developall of these new ideas unless you go and you tell them? and you tell them, you've gotto get organized around this new phenomena of learning, thisinternet-centric version of learning. and then the final thing is wehave to invest. the governor has laid out his plan, which iobviously think is brilliant. you have to invest in capital.
you have to invest in faculty. you have to invest in researchcollaborations. google, by the way, remember,came out of a collaboration at stanford. the fact of the matter is, idon't know what it is, but universities produce theseextraordinarily talented creative people every year. and every one of them has anopportunity to go and create another google here in richmond,in newport news, in
roanoke, in northern virginia. every single one of them isproducing entrepreneurs. the only problem we have is wedon't know who they are. we don't know their names yet. out of all those people, wedon't know the winners. but we want to make surethat the system will make that happen. the human genome project startedas a partnership between merck and georgewashington university that was
sort of nearby, in virginiaand near virginia. and, of course, it'schanged the world. because we now understand a lotabout the human genome. so if you look at the progressof history, you look at the progress of science, youlook at the progress of accomplishment, it all startshere with what we do, the way we work. and by the way, it's because thestudents are the ones that will make a change with ourhelp, with our leadership.
that's what it's all about. ultimately the studentis what matters. so if i think about this, ithink about this and just finish up with one thought. i believe this next generationexpects and deserves the absolute best. i think thatvirginians expect it. and i think that theydeserve it. it's a great state. what i like about what you allare doing, is i believe that
virginia with google helpingwill really deliver on that. that's why i'm so excitedto be here. so thank you very much. governor tim kaine: eric,thank you very much. and now what we want to do isopen it up and have questions. you'll see me a lotand have many chances to ask me questions. so i would hope that mostof the questions would be for eric.
i'm glad to answer some too. but with that, we'llopen it up. and i'll kind of playemcee and watch for hands around the room. yeah, please, jim. and then we'll repeat thequestion so that all in the room can hear. audience: eric, google has thereputation of hiring the most brilliant students.
can you describe how you screenfor that [inaudible]? governor tim kaine: howdoes google hire the most brilliant students? how do you screen for it? and how do you find talentthat can help an organization like this? go. eric schmidt: we copied theway universities do it. universities have hiringcommittees, and they do
searches, and they have teams,and they look at accomplishments. every person we hire isgraded on a score. we look at their gpas, whichturn out to matter. we look at the nature and thequality of the school and the program that they were in. and then we give them a test. by the way, programmers have todo a programming test. it's kind of obvious if youthink about it.
marketing people have to writea marketing document. sales people have to do a salescall on a salesperson. you can imagine how intimidatingthis is. with managers, what we do iswe asked them to write what are they going to do in thefirst six months in the job? and by the way, we don't tellthem that after they write that we throw it out. because we want to see whattheir thinking us. so it is possible to put ascience around recruiting.
we don't allow friendsto hire friends. often the hiring manager isnot part of the hiring committee, as an example,which again is a university thing. very, very few companiesdo this. and as far as know, we'rethe only one that does it with our rigor. the other thing that we dois we look at outcomes. we measure predictive scorersfrom the interview scores
versus predicted outcomes andthen we adjust based on bias. so if you, for example,are an easy grader. and we look at the quality andthe predicted outcome of people who you convinced us tohire, a year from now, we'll actually mathematically adjustyour grade down. sorry jim. it is possible to bring scienceand data to something as heuristic as recruiting. governor tim kaine: pleaseover here, allen.
audience: what should thepresidential candidate be talking about in terms ofincreasing science and technology [inaudible]? governor tim kaine: but for thewhole room, what should the presidential candidates betalking about in terms of increasing science andtechnology capacity of our population that they arenot talking about now? eric schmidt: the first thingi would do is give them governor kaine's speechand have them just
repeat it word by word. eric schmidt: that'sthe first thing. the second thing is that thereis this bizarre rule called h-1b visas. people here may beaware of this. these are people who arevery, very educated in science and math. and there's a quota which isfilled within a few days of the window opening ona yearly basis.
so we and other technologycompanies have employees who want to come to the unitedstates, who are brilliant scientists, who are parkedin another country. and when they get permission,they come in. they work for us anyway. when they come to the us,they pay taxes and they change the world. this anti-immigration phenomenain the country is a real issue, i think,for creating the
world's best place. we want, in the united states,the smartest people. we don't want them inother countries. sorry. eric schmidt: and by the way,because of the quality of us a higher education, theywant to be here, which is to your credit. it's phenomenal, right? you have a situation where thehigher education system, a
typical example is in china. everyone is obsessedwith china. our higher education system is100 than the chinese one. and nobody wants totalk about it. let's talk about whatour strength is. so that's the second point. the third is that both partieshave been bizarrely restrictive on the fundingrequired for a lot of key research programs. computerscience, which is what i'm
part of, has had essentiallyflat to slightly declining budgets for five years. and by the way, guess what? the percentage of graduates incomputer science has also been flat to declining inthe united states. no surprise. the money matters. i went to berkeley andwas funded because i didn't have any money.
it was funded by a nationalscience foundation fellowship. i needed the money. it was only $3,000. but i didn't have it. the concept of leverageis really fundamental. and in government, a smallinvestment now creates entrepreneurs and scientists whocreate billions of dollars of businesses. they create enormous amounts oftaxes and create huge jobs.
the problem is that thatlifespan is ten years, and the average politician isin office for two, three, four, five. so we have to have theconversation which is multigenerational. it has to be a partof both parties. we want the unitedstates to be. in otherwise what's going tohappen is we're going to have a sputnik moment.
i mean, all of the science andmath that i was part of occurred because we wereterrified of the russians. so now what's going to happenis somebody else is going to do this. and finally we're going to say,well, you know, we should certainly invest in science. why don't we do it now? so i think that's a simple list.there's a lot of others. governor tim kaine:please, ross?
audience: is there still adigital divide and is that still affecting the abilityto advance? governor tim kaine: digitaldivide question, how deep is that divide and maybe somethoughts on eliminating it. eric schmidt: governor, youhave a view on this. why don't you talk aboutthis state, rural and [unintelligible]. governor tim kaine: sure. i'll be glad to.
and then maybe i'll say it andthen eric, you can weigh in from google's standpoint. aneesh chopra, my secretary oftechnology i know is here. and he and others in the statework hard in these digital divide issues. we have viewed the digitaldivide somewhat as geographic with limited access to highquality telecom, high digital telecom in rural partsof virginia. with funds from the tobaccocommission, but also some
other funds, funds from thefederal government, we are building out a very extensivedigital network throughout rural virginia, southwest, andsouthside of significant spine there, eastern shore, so thatwe can really put the best capacity in all of thecommunities of the commonwealth. and so trying to build thatinfrastructure and build it in parts of the commonwealth thathave not been served, has been a key initiative that we'vebeen promoting.
we have an advisory committee. and i think governorwarner actually has agreed to come back. and he's the chairof it right now. so as we continue to build outthat network, we think we'll solve some of the geographicdigital divide. but i think ross, probably it'salso getting at, ok, so now it's available everywhere. what about families of differentincome levels or
different education levelsand how they access these opportunities for theiryoungsters. that's an additional seriousissue that we have to tackle. eric schmidt: in the early 90s,blacksburg did something remarkable. blacksburg, when i was growingup, was really quite remote. it became the most wiredcity in america. those of you who were inblacksburg or were part of vpi know this.
because they hadthe foresight-- and i suspect you had afair to do with this-- to actually go and take allthose apartment complexes that the students live in andwire them with fiber. somebody just had the ideaand they did it. it was a small enough townthey could just do it. so i learn something. and the thing i learned wasthat this digital divide internet thing, is the samething as rural electrification
in the 1940s. we're too young, thank goodness,to remember the fights in the '30s and '40saround the infrastructure required to get electricity allthroughout the rural areas of america. and many governors, includingthis one, have recognized that it's very, very important thataccess to information be independent of whereyou are physically. and the technology helps becausethe technology is
getting cheaper. so the problem you have now isyou have the other problems. and the fact of the matter is--and you all as educators know this-- if you put acomputer in a classroom, the quality of teaching doesnot a priori go up. people like me say, well,put a computer in. let them have it andhave a good time. it's a system. we can get it connected.
i think that the current digitaldivide is the values, expectations, parentalinvolvement, and school involvement in getting peopleto use these things. i will tell you that i encounterall sorts of people who say, i was inthis rural area. my family was poor. and i learned from google. i go, this is like terrifying. but if they're sitting therein some terrible, remote
place, that is their sourceof information. so i know it's havingan impact. but it has to be supplementedby many other things. governor tim kaine:i saw a hand. yes, in the red shirt there. audience: with the crazy amountof information that's getting on the internet, howdoes google or the whole industry plan to [inaudible]? governor tim kaine: yeah, theglut of information question--
with more and more informationand more and more storage, how does google try to make surethat search results retain relevance and don't just haulin all the dreck out there? so yeah, how do we do this? eric schmidt: we do haul in allthe dreck, we just put it lower than the highquality stuff. the good news about yourquestion is search is what google does. so every problem that we see,we see is a search problem.
so when i go through the mathabout the number of videos, and the amount of blogs, and soforth, you're never going to organize those anything otherthan a search process. we use very, very sophisticatedalgorithms that are proprietary to company-- they're so complicated, i don'teven understand them now as a computer science-- to actually rank and relateall that information to produce results that you see.
a typical situation is that ourcomputers are looking all the time for new information. and they're being rankedin parallel. so the tenth of a second or lessthat you see as a result, there are 100 computers thatcollaborated to rank, and rate, and give youthat information. we have a lot of ideas ofhow to make it better. a lot of them have to dowith personalization. the classic exampleis hot dog.
if the query is hot dog, am ihungry or do i have a dog that's hot. do i cool them offor something? put them in a bath of water. how do you disambiguatethose sorts of things. the ambiguity of language issomething that artificial intelligence techniques arevery, very good at. and we have a lot of newthings coming there. the other interesting thingwe're doing that i didn't talk
about but is probably relevanthere, is that we're working on translating every languageto every other language. computers can do this. humans can't. we have something calledstatistical machine translation where we look at atext and we look at the other language text, which has beentransmitted by a good translator. and then our algorithms can sortof figure out how to do
that repetitivelyfor any texts. it's magic. i don't really understandit and it's been explained to me twice. i don't think i'll everunderstand it. but basically what happens isyou take all of this stuff and you translate it. so we do chinese, arabic,and english. one of the terrible things inthe world is that there's a
very, very large body of arabicwork that's never been translated into anyother language. so here we are. we're all obsessed with allthese problems in the arab world and we don't evenunderstand their culture. and it works both ways,by the way. they benefit from seeingall our stuff too. governor tim kaine: questionhere in the back. audience: [inaudible phrase]?
eric schmidt: i didn'twant to do too much of a plug for google. we're doing one thing thateverybody should know about, which is that we're offeringpeople the ability to essentially haveuniversity-branded gmail accounts for freefor students. and you say, well, whywould we do that? the answer is, of course, theythen get used to our products and they use them whenthey graduate.
so it's a good businessdeal for us. it's a great business foruniversities because the management of that corpus ofcomputers and activity is pretty low value-addedand it's a huge pain. so this is an example where ourcomputers can do it better than a university can. and that's the testthat we applied. in the case of book search,we've signed up on the order of 20 libraries now--we're adding more--
who are giving us mostly worksthat are pre-1923. so it's pre-copyright law. and we're trying to have thelargest database of that. we give that informationback to the library so they have a copy. but the reality is it's easierfor the library to just let us do the hosting. again, they can havethe rights to. and then their studentscan use it in the
normal course of business. so far everybody seems to bepretty happy with that. we depend critically uponan educated citizenry. we depend in every country, notjust in the united states. so it's in our interest to getevery university up to speed, every bit of informationavailable to the smart students who really wantto pursue that. it's good business forgoogle as well. governor tim kaine: please.
governor tim kaine: the questionis conversations between google and textbookpurchasers, particularly for students or school systemsthat might have financial challenges to have thesetextbooks available. eric schmidt: actually we have.and we've had such great conversations that they'rebusy suing us. eric schmidt: sowe worked hard. and we actually like them. and we're sort of tryingto work it out.
so don't take thattoo seriously. but the offer that we've madeis that for things which are in print, so these textbooks,which is what you're referring to, we are perfectly happy toget a snippet, that is a small piece of information, and thenrefer the student to the book and to a web site where thebook can be purchased. we don't want to just take thebook and a copy of it, one because that would be aviolation of copyright, and two, the publishers actuallyhave to get
paid for their work. so we want to distinguishbetween the cost and the consumption. my view is that people willconsume media on any format and that book publishersshould be willing-- for the same amount ofmoney, by the way-- to make it available in abook as well as online. the trick is how to makeall that work. and that's our goal.
governor tim kaine: questions? yes, please. governor tim kaine: the questionis about eric's view on the wiki phenomenonas a way of putting knowledge together. eric schmidt: i havebeen struck by how good wikipedia is. there are so many sitesthat we deal with. it's gresham's law.
the bad content drivesout the good content. you see them all in all whenyou spend time online. but wikipedia has somehowmanaged to avoid that. and if you study what they did,they have a charismatic founder who does this outof love for the world. and he's a hero in my view. they have volunteer editors whomake sure that defamation, and sort of the scatological,and just all the wacky stuff that happens online isquickly eliminated.
people who do evil things to theinformation are shut out for a while as punishmentfor their evil behavior. and it has produced aremarkably accurate user-generated content. it is the poster child. the question i have is howreproducible is that? so here you are in youruniversity, and you want to build your own wiki. do you have to do allthe same things that
wikipedia has done? we at google use the wikipediatechnology. and wikis, for those of youwho don't know, are collaborative bulletinboards essentially. what to do is people are justconstantly adding information and so forth. it's a knowledge network, ifyou will, of information. but within a corporation, wehave control over who has access to it.
and again, we can controlfor quality. the fundamental question aboutuser-generated content is the gresham's law issue. if you have everybody producinguser-generated content, you get people whoare literally mad who have nothing to do but to generatespam hate mails. they just want to polluteeverything. i don't think they'rein virginia. i think they're in someweird country.
what do we do aboutthose people? i think that's the problem thatthe industry as a whole is addressing. governor tim kaine:yes, please. governor tim kaine: what isgoogle do to foster continuous innovation always ranked asone of the most innovative companies withinits employees? eric schmidt: the companyis very bottoms-up run. i seldom make any decisions.
it's all percolatingall the time. and the key incendiary thing issomething called 20% time. and basically if you're atechnical person, a product person in the company, weencourage you to spend 20% of your work time on something ofyour own interest. it doesn't even have to be about google. it doesn't have to beabout the internet. and as far as i know, we're theonly place in the world that does that.
and all of the interesting ideashave come out of that. because what will happened isthat some employee will spend the weekend, or friday, orwhatever working on it. and then all of a suddenthey'll begin to recruit their friends. and then a wave starts going. and all of a sudden i'll showup and there's ten people working on. and each one of them is 20%.
so it's like two people. well maybe you shouldcombined forces. and off we go. so the other aspect of what wedo that's actually useful is we have a ship and iteratephilosophy. what we try to do is we try tomake changes constantly. we don't wait fora product cycle. education, if i may, and i don'tmean to offend anyone, is the slowest movingorganization i ever deal with.
let's say you want to bringout a new textbook. ok, well, how long does it taketo produce a textbook? a year. then you have to get threeyears of approvals. right? so now we're up to four years. i'm sorry. that was a low number. so how are you ever going to usea textbook model and get
it to match this wikipediamodel? so i think that you all shouldthink about how can you use these ideas like 20% time. and, of course, the culture istolerant of failure, tolerant of fast iteration, andencourages individuals to spend 20% time. and i do want to be clear thatthere are groups that we do not encourage to do 20% time. so for example, finance people,we want them working
on keeping the moneyin the bank. yes, sir? governor tim kaine: how doesgoogle deal with the identity theft issue making sure thatsensitive information is not uploaded and then utilizedby people who intend to do others harm? eric schmidt: it does happento some degree. and it's obviouslynot a good thing. we detect credit card numbers,for example.
we detect social securitynumbers. we throw them out. in other countries, there areequal numbers to the social security number, so idnumbers and so forth. and when we detect themwe throw them out. and we try our hardest tolet people have choices. so, for example, since all ofyou have landlines, type your phone number into google. and you'll see if we have it.
because we may have gotten itthrough some database that you happened to have signed upwith a long time ago. we give you the abilityto delete it. you can leave it thereif you want. governor tim kaine:please, hank? governor tim kaine: howimportant is it for google that the employees that theyare hiring for technical positions also have agood liberal arts founding in their education?
eric schmidt: i think the bluntanswer is it depends on where they are in ourprotocol stack. we have some people who livein our engine room. and as best as i can tell, theyonly come out at night. and i think their lives areprobably much better enhanced by having a liberalarts education. their communication skillsare not so high anyway. i think anything you can dowith them is appreciated. the more serious answer isthat we have a cohort of
people who build our consumerproducts where the liberal arts education that you all haveprovided them has been phenomenal because they havejudgment, taste, sense, color, style, all the things that areengine room fellow lacks. let's see, maybe takeone or two more. please, yeah president runte. governor tim kaine: all right,let me summarize this. governor tim kaine: simpleand powerful point. the earlier discussion was aboutliberal arts and the
value of liberal arts even inhiring for technical capacity. and president runte sort ofextended it by saying, in a world of more and more content,so now a glut of content, isn't liberal artsreally important to be able to determine what is the contentthat is really valuable? so really promoting liberalarts as the building capacities of judgment to beable to take the massive amount of information and boilit down to the essentials. eric schmidt: again, i actuallyagree with the thesis
of your question, that we'revery good at organizing information. but we still don'thave insight. insight comes from a student,and faculty member, and a conversation, and thekinds of things that you all do so well. that is the benefit of aliberal arts education. with this explosion ofinformation, it gets worse. how do you sort out this idea,this idea, and this idea?
so you have to build in yourstudent a thesis, an approach, a model of how good decisionsare made, or good insights, or so forth, and then letthem run with it. the only thing i can suggest isthat universities will have to help studentssearch better. literally there will have toultimately be some kind of assistance. well, maybe this ishow you should think about this problem.
this is how you should lookup this information. this is how you shouldview it. and that's, i think, anemergent phenomenon. governor tim kaine: i'm goingto take one more question. but just before i do, just toencapsulate a little bit of this, it's been an interestingpresentation for business higher ed. council. it hasn't been a speechjust on you why higher
education is important. but i think two themes reallyemerge from-- at least two-- from eric's speech. first, he's shared with us theway learning is changing, and the way learning is changingamong the young. it's driven by technology. but it's even biggerthan that. and so how that's going tochange the mission of all of our organizations and certainlyrequire our
universities to really be at theforefront in this because they're at the forefrontof learning. but the second aspect of thespeech that really bears on the business higher council'slesson is just the phenomenal success story of google. it would not have been withouthigher education. the beginning points of googlein a higher education environment and then thiscontinuous innovation that has brought about by bringing inpeople who had access to the
best highest educationin the world. other nations may have passed usan x, y, or z, even in the percent of people thathave higher ed. degrees. but in the quality of the highered. programs we have, it's not a close race. we are head and shoulders abovethe rest of the world in terms of the quality of theeducational programs we have. the phenomenal success ofgoogle, and then its ability
to transform the world wouldn'thave happened without a strong higher educationsystem. and so those are two verypowerful messages the changes the way we learn and thecritical nature of higher ed. to this success story an so manyothers that really bear on your mission. let me take one more questionand then we'll move to lunch. just straight backhere, please. governor tim kaine: question wassort of there used to be a
number of search engines thatwere competitive with google. now google is ubiquitous and weall use the word google as a verb now. so that really is the test forhow ubiquitous it's become. so are there othercompetitors? or if not, do you have someadditional responsibilities as sort of a monopolist in thesearch for information? eric schmidt: very wellsaid, governor. i'll carefully not answerthe last part of the
sentence by the way. governor tim kaine:i can see why. eric schmidt: the sites thatyou named are still around. what they do is they becomemore specialized. and they offer specializedvalue for looking in some specific areas. our primary two competitors areyahoo! search engine and microsoft search engine. yahoo bought a bunch of themand aggregated them into a
competitor. and they do a good job. with respect to our marketshare and our role in the world, we take itvery seriously. we understand that people aremaking decisions based on google search results. a typical story is we get thisletter, this fellow saying, i typed in my symptoms. theanswer came back. the first result was, youare having a heart
attack, dial 911. so the person dials 911. the paramedics show upin three minutes. and they said if you had notdone that, you'd be dead. that's a life changingexperience. so we tell that story. imagine if you hadthe wrong result. this person would be dead. so we take it very seriously.
one thing that's alarming isthat a significant proportion of our queries arehealth-related, and yet, we're not doctors. we're just trying to organizemedical information in the and indeed, we have someinitiatives around that, around google health. so we take it seriously. ultimately there arealways going to be choices in this space.
we hope to be a commondenominator, a basic choice that you can start with. and if you have specializedinterests, you can go to some of these specialized engines. governor tim kaine: pleasethank eric again.
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