At Google Obama talks of shared experience

By Adam Tanner

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama told Google employees on Wednesday his meteoric rise in politics mirrored the company's emergence as the lifeblood of the Internet and he surprised his hosts by answering a geeky engineering question.

"There is something improbable about this gathering," the Illinois senator told a packed cafe auditorium of hundreds of Google employees. "What we share is a belief in changing the world from the bottom up."

Obama, 46, noted that a decade ago he was a little-known Illinois state senator and the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, were university students with big dreams. He cited the Google founders' success when asked about his relative lack of political experience.

"I suppose Sergey and Larry did not have a lot of experience starting a Fortune 100 company," said Obama.

Some employees lined up more than an hour to hear Obama while others crowded the rafters above the auditorium.

"There's definitely been a buzz here all day," said Nicole Resz, 26, who works in Google's advertising department. "I've never seen so many people at a Google event. We've had everybody, we've had Mikhail Gorbachev."

"He's fresh, he's new, there's something about him that's Google-like."

Six other presidential candidates, including Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Edwards and Republican John McCain have already spoken at Google, which has become a major stop on the campaign trail this year.