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| Shortly after joining Yahoo, Semel said, company founders Jerry Yang
| and David Filo suggested he look at buying up-and-comer Google,
| whose Stanford grad founders looked up Yahoo's inventors. So Semel
| said he had dinner with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, asking them what
| their business was with Yahoo paying only $7 million annually as its
| biggest licensor of Google search technology.
|
| "They had no thought process on the subject," Semel said in the
| conversation, which was posted online Thursday at the New Yorker Web site.
|
| So Semel nevertheless asked to buy Google. They replied that they wanted
| $1 billion and didn't want to sell. Semel said he'd think about the
| price.
|
| Another dinner and Semel agreed to the $1 billion. Larry and Sergey
| replied that they wanted $3 billion and didn't want to sell.
|
| "I couldn't and didn't buy this company and the rest is history," Semel
| said, adding that it was also fortuitous because that harkened the birth
| of the search-advertising business.
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