''We have pride that we are building a service that is really important to the world and really successful for the long term,'' Mr. Page said.

The cornerstone of Google's search technology is something it calls Page Rank (after Larry Page, not Web page). It determines a site's popularity based on the number of other sites that have links pointing to it. When a user types a query into Google, it first finds all the pages that contain the query terms and then displays the pages in order, based on the Page Rank.

The founders, both sons of university professors, take pride in their tough admission standards, having interviewed 50 candidates before choosing Mr. Schmidt as chief executive, for example.

The search was ''interminable,'' said Michael Moritz, the Sequoia Capital venture capitalist who is on Google's board. They still have not picked a chief financial officer. The soft-spoken Mr. Schmidt fit in because he is an accomplished engineer who happens to have spent some time running a company.

Mr. Brin and Mr. Page, who share a dry and impetuous sense of humor, have also cultivated an impudent culture, as if nerds had taken over a college dorm. Programmers work by the light of lava lamps into the wee hours of the morning, taking breaks to ride motorized scooters down the halls and eat spicy meals prepared by the house cook, Charlie Ayers, the former chef for the Grateful Dead.

This bitbucket bonhomie has resulted in a steady stream of nifty features, like a rather unusual approach to fixing users' spelling errors. Instead of a predetermined dictionary, it looks for correct spelling in its index of the entire Web. That means it can propose correct spellings to proper names, and it works in 74 languages, most of which no one at Google has ever spoken. Or in some cases, no person anywhere has ever spoken: Google runs versions of its sites in a few languages that no one has spoken, like Bork Bork Bork, purported to be the tongue of the Swedish chef on ''The Muppet Show.''

The company is so infatuated with its technical prowess and sense of destiny that it has developed a reputation as being difficult to deal with.