Google “Christophe Bisciglia.” You’ll learn how the 27-year-old Google wunderkind, who grew up in Gig Harbor, made the cover of BusinessWeek magazine last month for a breakthrough technological innovation.

Bisciglia devised a way to re-create for the academic community a computational platform similar to the one used by Google engineers to manage a world’s worth of data and provide eye-blink-fast Internet searches. Bisciglia’s approach started with a bank of interconnected, data-packed computers installed at the University of Washington.

Your Google search also will pull up a newspaper story describing how Bisciglia hacked into the computer network of a Port Orchard Internet service provider in 1999, sent disparaging e-mails about the company to all its customers, and uploaded a pornographic photo – a close-up of a man’s bare rear end – to the company’s Web site.

Bisciglia pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and got two years’ probation, court records show.

You won’t find the back story to Bisciglia’s hacking adventure via Google, in BusinessWeek or by asking Bisciglia himself.

“I’m sure you can imagine it’s not something I like to advertise,” Bisciglia wrote me in an e-mail.

No, for the back story you have to talk with Tacoma attorney Erik Bauer, who represented Bisciglia and escorted him to Seattle in 2000 to meet with two FBI agents and a U.S District Court attorney.

The businessman who started the ISP venture hired Bisciglia – then a Gig Harbor High School student – with unwritten promises of future compensation if the whiz kid would handle his technical Web development tasks, Bauer said.

“The kid was a boy genius – way ahead of his years intellectually” when it came to computers, but not so much with business contracts, Bauer said.

“When the (ISP) guy didn’t follow through, Christophe got justice – juvenile-style,” Bauer said. “It was not the hacking case of the decade. It was a stupid kid thing to do.”

More than anything, the experience taught Bisciglia a lesson, demonstrated his computer prowess, and foreshadowed his enduring comfort with risk-taking, which led to the senior software engineer’s latest Google innovation.

At Google, you see, the company allows employees to use 20 percent of their work time to pursue approved personal projects for which they have a passion. So, Bisciglia went back to his alma mater, the University of Washington, to, at first, teach students how Google’s worldwide computer databanks – or clouds – work.

But it evolved into more than a lecture and demo.

“I definitely started out thinking big. However, my initial ideas were a bit different,” Bisciglia said in an telephone interview from Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google CEO Eric Schmidt “advised me to keep thinking big, but start by focusing on something I could accomplish in two months.

“I took him up on this and started with a course. In doing that, the big vision of providing large-scale computational resources to the academic community – and exactly how to do that – became clear.”

Clear, in this case, meant ordering 40 computers he planned to wire together at the UW in 2006. Only after the installers started linking the servers together did Busciglia warn his Google superiors of the bill he’d racked up.

“I am not afraid of being told ‘no,’” Bisciglia said. “It happens sometimes, but more often than not, Google management chooses to take risks and invest in our ideas. Sure, sometimes we royally screw things up, but more often than not, our policy of hiring and empowering smart people pays off.”

Bisciglia’s computer cloud – and the bill for the computers – surprised Google’s brass. But the company paid it.

“I didn’t realize he was going to try to change the way computer scientists thought about computing. That’s a much more ambitious goal” than teaching a course, CEO Schmidt told BusinessWeek.

The magazine hit newsstands just before Christmas. On the cover stood Bisciglia in a T-shirt, arms folded, his wavy-maned head tilted back looking up at the wispy clouds over Google HQ.

On Tuesday, Fortune magazine’s 2008 Best Companies To Work For list came out. Google ranked No. 1. Fortune’s coverage included a sidebar on 10 Fascinating Googlers – employees who make the company tick. Bisciglia made the list.

Back home in Gig Harbor, Bisciglia’s parents, Jim and Brenda, gushed at the celebrity of the oldest of their four high-achieving children.

“From a very young age I knew that Christophe was exceptional,” Brenda said. “His play was so rich. He loved building sets when he was small. He didn’t build houses and cars though, he created cities and infrastructures.

“He also liked to tie things together with string or twine. One year, when he was 6, at our family Christmas dinner he tied together 12 dining room chairs so efficiently that we had to cut them apart to eat dinner.”

Mom put up with disruptive creative experiments some other mothers wouldn’t.

“I believe that children need space, room to explore, a lack of interruption when they are engaged in meaningful activity, and I have been willing for the past 27 years to step over projects on my living room floor, ignore messes on the table, allow cables to be staple-gunned down hallways connecting things to other things – that was Christophe! – and basically allow our home to be a place where our kids could truly be themselves, explore what they were interested in,” she said.

She sounds as if she got her parental training from the let-them-be-creative-and-see-what-happens managers at Google. No wonder recruiters for the search engine giant went after him.

Christophe and a partner in the UW computer science program, for a class project, developed their own Internet search engine – the most powerful one ever built by students in the history of that course.

“I still remember sitting in the lab thinking, ‘How can I show someone at Google what we are doing here?’” Bisciglia recalled. At that moment, an “e-mail arrived in my inbox saying, ‘Hi from Google.’”

Unbeknown to Bisciglia, his artificial-intelligence professor tipped off a contact at Google to the kid’s inartificial intelligence.

Google, generally, recruited advanced degree holders rather than undergrads, but “as soon as I started talking with the engineering team, it was clear this was a great match,” Bisciglia said.

These days, following his news-making innovation, Bisciglia travels often to Google’s China offices – so much so that he started learning Mandarin and might take an apartment in China.

That’s a long way from his family’s 10-acre farm in Gig Harbor. The Bisciglias moved there in 1989 from the San Fernando Valley in California, where Jim had run a mass-market travel agency and Brenda worked as a flight attendant for United Airlines.

Now, Jim and Brenda run an online travel business at specialtycruise.com, which sells deluxe, niche cruises and books Italian villas. The family business owes a share of its success to Christophe’s computer wizardry. He developed the company’s Web presence.

“My parents are, of course proud,” Christophe Bisciglia said, “and have now forgiven me for any headaches I may have given them as a child.”

Dan Voelpel: 253-597-8785

dan.voelpel@thenewstribune.com