If employees at Google are anxious about the future, you wouldn't know it from a visit to the company's headquarters. Since last fall, when talk of an initial public offering got investors salivating, the organization has been under unusual scrutiny: some observers have called it "the hottest company on the planet," while others claim it's a business in leaderless disarray, with competitors crowding in and major customers on the verge of defection. But the Google complex in Mountain View, CA, is as outwardly carefree as any college campus. The main lobby is a study in shagadelic kitsch, with a baby grand piano, a spinning party light, and a row of neon-bright lava lamps arranged in the same blue-red-yellow-blue-green-red sequence as the company's familiar logo. The cafeteria pulses with rock music, shouted conversation, and the sounds of geeks slurping free gourmet food. Upstairs, in the cubicle farms, programmers chitchat across walkways littered with toys, Segway transporters, and the occasional canine.

It's only when I sit down in a quiet conference room with Google director of technology Craig Silverstein that the giddy dot-com mood turns more serious. Now that companies like Google and Internet ad agency Overture have demonstrated that displaying subject-specific paid ads alongside the results on a search page is a real moneymaker-contributing to an estimated $2 billion in industrywide revenues in 2003-a pack of wannabes are investing in search software they say will give users more pertinent results than Google's, faster. I ask Silverstein whether Google's famous focus on better technology will keep it ahead of all that competition. His answer is circumspect.

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