Anurag Acharya, 38, a senior software engineer at the Mountain View-based company is “the person most responsible for growing the Google index of Web documents,” according to one insider. That’s no small index, either. Visitors can access more than two billion Web pages, more than 300 million images, and a 20-year archive of 700 million conversations on Usenet, the massive, public bulletin board that budded alongside the Internet, with postings falling into a whopping 35,000 categories.

Not that Acharya will take much credit for this still-ballooning digital index. “I’m the project lead, but there are four other engineers doing exactly the same thing,” he insists.

What Acharya will admit to is helping devise the way in which Google determines which several million pages, of the gobs in existence, are important enough to add and refresh on a daily basis. He’s quick to explain that he “can’t divulge any details,” but he does offer this tidbit: “We update the index based on a combination of what’s likely to change, and what should be seen as a priority. You have pages that have important content but aren’t liable to change often. You have pages that might change a lot, but whose content isn’t terribly useful.” Suddenly, he pauses, then abruptly adds, “I’d tell you more, but I can’t.”

That Acharya is at Google at all seems a bit surprising considering his path so far. Acharya was born in Bikaner, India to a civil engineer and a homemaker. His life until early 2000 was largely shaped by their wish that he become an academic. Sent at an early age to live with his uncle, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur, Acharya turned to academia too. After years of being surrounded by science (and science instructors), he obtained an undergraduate degree from the Institute, then headed to the United States to study computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his Ph.D. “I always wanted to be a professor,” he says now. “It was in front of me every day; I never considered anything else.”

Acharya’s next move was to join researchers at the University of Maryland, where he conducted postdoctoral work in scalable systems. The idea, he says, was to find a way to speed the processing of certain data up to seven orders of magnitude faster than before. NASA caught wind of his successful efforts and came calling, requesting help in uncovering ways to more quickly process some of its many terabytes of satellite data. Soon, Acharya found himself dividing his time between the University and NASA, and wondering when he would get to teach full time.

That chance finally came in 1998, when the University of California at Santa Barbara offered him a job. There, as an associate professor, Acharya taught courses on operating systems and on programmable network services and, perhaps most importantly, explored an idea called “active disks,” whose underlying aim was to process data as close to where it lives as possible. As he explains it, “The thinking behind active disks was that instead of your hard drive being a receptacle of data, it could actually be used as a processor. The disk could simply find out what you wanted, rather than transfer the whole file to some other processing center.”

It’s a similar principal that has helped catapult Google to the top of the search company heap. While many big sites use far-flung storage area networks to store data for faster processing, Google simply uses enormous amounts of conventional disk storage, all of which resides, amazingly, within roughly 16,000 PCs that are racked room-high in its four data centers.

Acharya recalls that working at Google seemed like a good fit from the moment he first visited its headquarters at the invitation of a UCSB colleague and member of Google’s executive management team, Urs Holzle. “I thought the company was interesting, given what Urs had told me about it in advance,” says Acharya. “Now I think it’s fantastic,” he says.

So does the rest of the country, which is clamoring for Google, now profitable according to CEO Eric Schmidt, to go public. The company acknowledges that plans for an offering have been discussed, but while many observers anticipate an IPO in the first or second quarters of 2003, Google management refuses to discuss any time frame. Its top mission at this point, rather, is expanding its strong position in public search to other areas, including the enterprise. This past winter, for example, it announced a line of bright yellow, laptop-size server appliances designed to help companies harness Google’s crawling and page-ranking capabilities to index the documents hidden behind their own firewalls. The cheapest model starts at $20,000 and includes two years of software updates and Google support; a higher-end model sells for $250,000.

Working at Google, which prides itself on being a technology company above all else, isn’t easy. Acharya works 12 to 14 hours a day — after scaling back from his earliest days on the job, he says. He has taken exactly one vacation in the last two years: to honeymoon with his wife, who is getting a Ph.D. in biochemistry at UC Santa Cruz. He hasn’t had much opportunity to familiarize himself with the robust Indian-American community in Silicon Valley, either, he says. “I haven’t had time. I’m so busy, and my free time I spend with my wife.”

Acharya isn’t complaining, though. While he says he contemplates returning at some point to India, where his parents, two siblings, and extended family still live, he also speaks warmly of his co-workers and says his experience in the corporate world has taught him many valuable lessons he would likely have missed had he not taken the detour that he did.

In the end, living life as a software engineer, however unexpectedly, seems to be suiting him just fine. “We’ve built something that’s really scalable, something that was built the right way the first time around. I’m very happy to be at Google,” he says. A rare dot-com IPO probably wouldn’t hurt matters.