Video Of Google’s Sergey Brin At Web 2.0

Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, made a surprise visit at the Web 2.0 Summit last week. The video of his 18 minute interview with John Battelle is now available on YouTube. Here it is:

In summary, he talked about his thoughts on Twitter’s deal, Google’s Social Search, also a little bit about Bing and even Yahoo giving up on search. He actually touches on about a couple dozen topics within this short interview.

Here are some quotes from Brin’s talk that I thought I pull out:

Battelle asked Brin, what do you make of Bing? Brin said, “Ummm…” Then Battelle asked, are you a Bing user? “Oh yea, I use all search engines out there.”

Brin then added there are “probably a few dozen start ups doing a few interesting things” in search. Brin added, “even, prior to Bing, MSN’s Live.com had many interesting features also and a lot of those carried over. People just didn’t check them that often.”

Then Brin was quoted on Yahoo, saying “It is a shame that Yahoo plans to abdicate that area.” He added, “I do think Yahoo had a number of interesting innovations there and I wish they would continue to innovate in search.”

On Tim Armstrong leaving Google to run AOL, Brin said, “We certainly miss Tim [Armstrong] a lot. It is really good for AOL to have a leader like that.”

The discussion about Twitter was a bit awkward in the beginning. Battelle asked if he [Brin] had anything to do with the Twitter deal? Brin said awkwardly, “me personally?, I was certainly aware of it.” He then goes on to talk about entrepreneurship. But he did clarify “I did not try to buy Twitter.”

Brin also said, “People do not spend all their attention in the search box,” when defending critics about Google’s dominance. Battelle added, monetarily, they do kind of control the area. Brin replied “when we started Google, it was the least amount you can make,” when referring to ad buys.

Also, when talking about Google developing hardware. Brin said, “G1, we worked very closely with HTC on the design.” He added, “you can’t create software completely divorced from how the hardware is designed.”

On the book scanning project, Brin said “I’ve been surprised about the level of controversy there.”

Finally, here is a picture of special shoes Brin wore to the Web 2.0 Summit: