What’s a search engine? Who’s your webmaster? And our favorite: Does a search engine need to be physically plugged into your computer to work?
These are but a few of the hilarious questions a baby-faced Sergey Brin and two Brin impersonators had to answer on the short-lived game show, To Tell the Truth. In 2000, Brin took a few hours off from his world-changing Silicon Valley startup to go on national television and field queries from a celebrity panel that included comedians like *Full House'*s Dave Coulier.
His goal was to convince clueless celebs into identifying him as the co-founder of Google, which was then a brand-new type of internet tool. The catch? Two impostors -- a lawyer and a remarkably tech savvy professional bowler -- were trying to do the same. Of course, Google Guru Brin wasn't just doing this for fun. He was hawking the powers of Google in front of a national audience in an era when tech companies were hardly household names.
Google Perks: 2000-style
A special slice of history --- nearly 15 years after the episode aired -- is the "sworn affidavit" Brin created for the show. It offers an enticing snapshot of Google life at the embryonic Googleplex. Google had just 170 employees at the time. For them, things were pretty sweet.
“Not only is our site one of the hippest on the web, but our work environment in the Googleplex is heaven for employees. Our Googlers have at their disposal a full-time masseuse, saunas, all the Ben & Jerry bars they can eat, plus organic meals by the guy who used to cook for a famous rock band,” stated Brin’s affidavit, read by wonderfully mellifluous host John O’Hurley. From its inception, Google was setting a high bar for the types of employee benefits that would becomestandard in Silicon Valley. Free dry cleaning andshuttle buses would soon follow.
Beyond the laundry list of cushy perks, Brin’s statement also had a more direct message for consumers, and a jab at its much bigger rival, Yahoo: “Our search engine is so smart that other prominent portals default to Google when they can’t find what they’re looking for.”
In the end, Brin and Google would eventually win the search wars, and as Hurley states at the beginning of the show -- millions would continue to "go ga-ga over his Google."
Hurley's words, not ours.
“We’ve been down this road before. We’ve been seduced and abandoned,” host O’Hurley warns the panelists after they’d all had their shot at interrogating the Brins and cast their votes. Then he asks the real Google Guru to please stand up.
We have to admit, the lawyer is not a bad Sergey -- even if he thinks Google is based in Redmond. The pro bowler, RD Miller, has plenty of technical chops, too, as a web developer and database engineer, even though he tells them he's a pro-bowler.
Do the fake Sergeys dupe Coulier and his clan? Watch and find out.
