This week, we’ve seen a lot of coverage of Google’s 10th anniversary, yet most writers have spent little time covering Google’s really early days, when the company was just a scrappy startup with a handful of employees. Here’s a great interview with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin from January 1999, by Karsten Lemm, a correspondent for the German newsmagazine Stern. An excerpt from Google’s First Steps:

How do you see Google develop? At some point, do you see yourselves on par with AltaVista, Excite, all these other established search engines?

Sergey: I would say no. We want to be on par with Yahoo, or Amazon, AOL. AltaVista, Excite and [the others] are by no means viewed as the winners. There’s no question, we want to be number one in market share in terms of search. And I think we can do that in not so long. Past that, it’s really hard to predict.

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Related Topics: Google: Employees

About The Author: Chris Sherman (@CJSherman) is Executive Editor of SearchEngineLand.com and President of Searchwise LLC, a Boulder Colorado based Web consulting firm. He also programs and co-chairs the Search Marketing Expo - SMX conference series. See more articles by Chris Sherman