Just scratching the surface of what’s possible: Larry Page in Google Founders’ Letter

The year 2013 saw a lot of Google projects come to the limelight. From Project Loon, to Glass to self-driving cars, each of these supposed ‘moonshots’ made big progress last year, while Android really asserted its dominance on the smartphone market. It was also the year, when Google turned 15 and as it enters its 16th year in existence, CEO Larry Page says they’re ‘just scratching the surface of what’s possible’

In the annual Founders’ Letter , Page went over the changes seen in Google’s top products, such as Chrome, Search, Android and Google +. It highlighted the cloud infrastructure that Google has been trying to champion across platforms, and spoke about what Google has in store for the future, without alluding to specific products.

Page said that over 100 billion searches are registered on Google every month, with 15 percent of queries being completely new. But Page says the search engine of his dreams is far from ready. “we’re a million miles away from creating the search engine of my dreams, one that gets you just the right information at the exact moment you need it with almost no effort.  That’s partly because understanding information in a deep way is a hard problem to solve.  Google Now is starting to tackle this challenge,” he wrote, before going into contextual information, conversational search and serendipitous content discovery.

Page wrote most about advances in Search, but also went over how Loon has been doing . “It’s a tragedy that with so much information available today, two-thirds of the world’s population lack even the most basic Internet connection.  That’s why I’m so excited the team has gotten Project Loon off the ground (literally). The idea is to create a network of balloons on the very edge of space that can provide connectivity in rural and remote areas.  Soon there will be a classroom in northeast Brazil we are working to put online for the first time, using Loon,” he wrote.

Page ended his note by talking about innovation and reinvention, giving us an insight into how Google takes on seemingly impossible projects “It’s amazing what you can achieve with a small dedicated team when you start from first principles and aren’t encumbered by the established way of doing things. Yet I’ve learned over time that it’s surprisingly difficult to get teams to be super ambitious because most people haven’t been educated in this kind of moonshot thinking. They tend to assume that things are impossible, or get frightened of failure."

It’s why we’ve put so much energy into hiring independent thinkers at Google, and setting big goals. Because if you hire the right people and have bold enough dreams, you’ll usually get there.   And even if you fail, you’ll probably learn something important.”