Google CEO's advice: Search for the real thing

If any one company has kept our noses buried in flickering display screens, it's Google - the search-engine giant and owner of YouTube and other high-profile attention-grabbers.

But yesterday, Google's chief executive officer, Eric Schmidt, counseled the University of Pennsylvania commencement attendees at Franklin Field that "you need turn off your computer, turn off your phone, look at the people who are near and around you, and decide that humans are the most important things, not the other aspects."

He also argued that to err isn't just human, it's essential to a productive life outside the campus. "George Bernard Shaw said, 'All progress depends on the unreasonable man.' All that stuff about having a plan, throw that out. You cannot plan innovation. You cannot plan invention. All you can do is try very hard to be in the right place and be ready."

Full of good cheer (even in this economy, California-based Google still cleared $1.42 billion in the first quarter), Schmidt warmed up the chilly crowd with a comparison of his college days in the 1970s with today. "We had Tang; you had Red Bull. We had VCRs that held an hour of programming and cost $700; you have iPods that can upload 15 hours of video . . . in a minute . . . . We didn't tell everyone about our most embarrassing moment; you record them and post them to Facebook and YouTube every day. I'm so happy my record of misachievements isn't around for posterity. I'm looking forward for yours to be there for many years."

Afterward, in a chat with reporters at the Palestra, he continued the then-versus-now theme, marveling about the positive changes he'd discovered anew in Philadelphia - "traveling from here to the Art Museum area and to Independence Hall" - since he last visited the city as a Princeton undergraduate. And he argued that local high-tech entrepreneurs should keep their eyes on Center City, rather than on suburban campuses, to lure in the new grads "who want to live in interesting, diverse places with vibrant culture."

Schmidt likewise raved up Penn for a "transformation in the last 10 or 15 years," and for supplying "more nonengineering interns" to Google than any other college in the country - one reason he'd accepted Penn president Amy Gutmann's invitation to address the graduating classes of 2009.

The Google chief also shared positives for Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, with whom he chats "at least once a week" and is engaged on several business levels.

Their primary concern, at the moment, is "trying to figure out how to make ubiquitous broadband [high-speed Internet service] really happen in the U.S."

Also, for those on the go, Google and Comcast have investments (along with Sprint, Clearwire, Intel, Bright House Networks and Time Warner) in the burgeoning high-speed-wireless technology known as WiMAX, which he said would be available in Philadelphia soon.

What about Google's hot-and-cold relationship with newspapers, the primary source of all that Google-accessible information that Schmidt proudly cited in his commencement address as "critical for keeping checks and balances" on the political system? How's Google going to keep watchdogs alert when it's giving away their bones?

"We need to do whatever it takes to make sure investigative reporting continues to flourish," Schmidt said. "Today, newspapers allow us to search and index their information. It's easy for their computers to block us with a robot file, but they've made the decision that it's OK for us to point to their content, because we send traffic to their sites. In a sense, we're in this together.

"As to the 'Where's the money?' question, that's much harder. We have not yet, in my view, developed a good substitute for the totality of revenue that newspapers have.

"But Google will certainly not become a paid service," Schmidt vowed.