Google’s co-founders and the California Internet titan’s chief executive Eric Schmidt each took only US$1 in pay last year, a filing on Tuesday with US regulators indicates.
Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Schmidt stuck with their usual US$1 annual paychecks despite tough economic times that have eroded billions of dollars in value from their Google stock holdings.
“Eric, Larry and Sergey have voluntarily elected to receive only nominal cash compensation,” Google said in a proxy statement filed on Tuesday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. “Their primary compensation continues to come from returns on their ownership stakes in Google.”
The trio at the top of Google’s command structure received no bonuses either.
Page owns about 29.2 million shares of Google stock while Brin holds 28.6 million shares, making them the firm’s biggest stock holders and giving the duo controlling interest, the filing said.
Schmidt has the third largest stake in the company, owning just shy of 9.4 million shares.
Meanwhile, Google on Tuesday modified its globally popular Internet search service to understand relationships between words, as the company bids to better grasp what Web users are looking for.
Along with taking into account intended meanings of search terms, Google beefed up results pages with longer snippets in summary paragraphs focused on what people appear to be seeking.
“We’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search,” Google search quality team technical lead Ori Allon and snippets team engineer Ken Wilder wrote in a blog post. “We are now able to target more queries, more languages, and make our suggestions more relevant to what you actually need to know.”
Internet search services have traditionally been based on matching key words typed into query boxes with words at Web sites or in other online data.
There has been growing interest in “semantic searches” that are smart enough to go beyond simply matching words to understanding what sentences or combinations of words mean.
Google on Tuesday rolled out semantic search capabilities in 37 languages.
Examples given by Wilder and Allon included a search in Russian for “fortune-telling with cards” yielding search results that included “tarot” and “divination.”
A Google search in English for “principles of physics” triggers suggestions to inquire about “big bang” and “quantum mechanics.”
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