Only one man has been with Google since the beginning, apart from Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders.

Craig Silverstein was another student at Stanford. He was studying theoretical computer science and had an interest in search and data mining.

By January 1996, Mr Page and Mr Brin had begun collaborating on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyse the “back links” pointing to a given website. They showed Mr Silverstein and others a demonstration.

He was blown away. When the Google co-founders left to set up their search engine business, they asked Mr Silverstein to join them. He became Google Employee No 1, with the title Director of Technology.

In the ten years since, his title (unlike his salary) has not changed.

Of the demo he said: “It was a eureka moment. Usually with research you have to have a good imagination to see the potential, but this required no leap of faith. All you had to do was believe that search was going to be important.”

The milestones of Google’s meteoric growth in staff and profits are part of company folklore, but for Mr Silverstein, from the inside, it was not until Playboy published a big story about Google in early 1999 that he realised how things might go.

“I always imagined we were going to be an 80 to 100-person company,” Mr Silverstein, 35, told The Times. Google has about 19,000 staff around the world.

The Google IPO in 2004 enabled many employees to become multi-millionaires. Mr Silverstein said that the money did not make that much difference to the culture of the company, nor to his personal life: “It was nice to have that recognition from the market, that freedom.”

Mr Page and Mr Brin were careful to employ people who cared about search and not necessarily about “making a zillion dollars”, he said.

When Google signed the big deal with Yahoo! in June 2000 that really signalled its arrival as a huge force, the guys got out some champagne to celebrate in the office kitchen. Mr Brin decided that food should be served to accompany the fizz. They got burgers from McDonald’s.

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