Customer Reviews

Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"Planet Google" is a simple, well-written overview of Google and its business. The book explains how Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google while they were students at Stanford and made it their mission to organize all of the world's information.

The various chapters in the book relate how and why Google acquired companies such as YouTube and Keyhole. The book explores the opposition and challenges that Google has faced as it has become larger and entered new areas.

I found "Planet Google" to be neither worshipful nor vindictive. It was largely unbiased reporting. The book does not say much about the people or personalities involved. There is not much time spent on anecdotal storytelling. This book is more of a straight-forward review of how Google started, what Google has done, and thoughts about Google's future.

"Planet Google" provides a good overview for someone who does not know much about the company, but does not really provide much depth.

The book's title flatters to deceive. The "audacious plan to organize everything we know" has significant impacts on almost all aspects of our lives and how new IT business models emerge - privacy, accessibility, level playing ground for education, security, etc..; growth of software-as-a-service and service-oriented architecture. Despite these meaty issues that the author's premise would have allowed him to provide an in-depth analysis of the trends and implications, he chooses to provide a superficial narration that reads more like a Businessweek article. To be fair, the author did write a few sentences on the above topics, but only as an introduction to his narration of some of the behind-the-scenes incidents that shaped Google's growth. After various authors have done this before, (more notable example - The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time and The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture), this book breaks relatively new ground for even a casual reader in this space. Nevertheless, the narrations discussing the algorithm itself, and Google's foray into video search and Youtube, travails with Google Answers, email scanning and search, the ambitious book scanning project, and growth pains of Google Maps are entertaining and provides some interesting tidbits. For someone familiar with the search space and avid user of Google, some of these discussions may seem yesterday's news.

Even if it is not, the author misses an opportunity to analyze the fundamental impact Google's 'audacious plan' can have on us. The most glaring omission is Google Health - here is an attempt by Google to develop an ecosystem that stores electronic health records and allows other service providers to tap into this information as and when the owner of the health record permits. The implications of this can be far-reaching and a game changer for how healthcare is viewed in the world, particularly in the U.S. There is perhaps one tangential reference to Google Health in the book.

The book is well narrated, with a sense of urgency that keeps the reader captivated. The notes section of the book is well-organized and provides additional citations and information for the more serious reader (in fact, if some of the information that are now hidden in the notes section had found its way to the main text, the book may have read better). Overall, an entertaining read, but providing no or superficial analysis/insights.

This was a great book. Written in lay mans terms, this book is a macro view of google - from birth pangs to its 10th year birthday.

Google has been a company which has been a source of inspiration and intrigue for the past decade. Like all big firms, it has had its fair share of problems (legal and competition wise) but it is still standing.

The book talks about all the steps Google has taken to follow it initial mantra of getting all the data in the world together and indexed. From youtube to keyhole to its documents software to its news reader, this book briefly talks about all of googles achievements.

This is not a book which talks in depth about the life of google but it does give the reader a glimpse of one of the most innovative and exciting companies in the world.

For readers who appreciated The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, this book loosely picks up where the former book sort of left off. "The Search" (by different author and published in 2005) covers the origin and growth of general Web search technology and the rise of Google the company up to the point shortly after its IPO. "Planet Google" mainly takes a look at what the company has been doing since (circa 2004-08) and focuses on Google's many attempted forays into products and technologies beyond the core Web search. A chapter is dedicated for each of Google's better-known endeavors, namely book digitization, video/YouTube, Google Earth/Maps, datacenter buildup, Gmail and privacy issues, the go for open-source everything, and the debate of machine-only vs. human-assisted search algorithm.

The author claims to enjoy fairly generous access to Google's facilities and some of its top executives, including CEO Eric Schmidt. The book provides a quick read and is much shorter than the number of pages would suggest as the last 75 pages contain only massive amount of footnotes. It will certainly delight those who have always been fascinated by everything Google.

The phenomenon known as Google had its beginnings in a Stanford University dorm room. Graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin intended at first only to search web pages and index them. From the beginning, Google had no air of the corporate world about it. Their model is based in the engineering world: define a problem and it can be solved. Their informal company slogan? "Don't be evil."

Brin's and Page's vision was to organize all the world's information, and to do it strictly according to computer code that weights and ranks web pages to determine their places in search results. Google relied from the beginning on the principle of letting the computer program -- "the algorithm" -- do the ranking of pages. Strict reliance on the algorithm has allowed Google to "scale" rapidly -- that is, index huge amounts of new information and accommodate rapid spikes in the number of searches performed by users. Three years ago the company revealed that it had crawled and indexed 8 billion pages, but no updates have been forthcoming since then.

How do they pay for it? Advertising. Brin and Page initially believed that advertising was a sure path to biased results and wanted no part of it for their search engine. In 2000, however, they began to experiment with text ads targeted to the search terms, contracting with advertisers who would pay a price per click. The money rolled in, funding enormous expansion. The company approach to insuring capacity has been unique and uniquely successful; they are the McDonald's of the tech world; all in the name of scalability.

Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know is organized along product lines. Chapters are devoted to the following initiatives: (1) The mission to digitize all books in and out of print, a product now known as Google Book Search (the company's self-described "moon shot"); (2) The foresighted acquisition of YouTube; (3) The product line containing Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Street View; and (4) "Cloud computing."

"Cloud computing," or Software as a Service, refers to the concept of standard personal and office-type applications residing "in the cloud" -- on the web -- rather than on the user's PC. These are the applications that Microsoft "owns" and Google has begun going head to head with the giant: Google Calendar, Google Documents and Spreadsheets, and especially Google Mail. A full gig of storage ensured that users could save all their e-mail, all searchable. How to pay for it, and for the redundancy to avoid loss of data? Google Ads, of course. Consumers quailed at the targeted text ads, so closely linked to the content of their e-mails, but a bigger barrier to mail and apps "in the cloud" is the legal requirement on companies to preserve and manage all e-mail and internal documents. This one is still evolving.

New York Times columnist Randall Stross gives a good flavor of the company culture, and of the principles that have paid off so hugely: organization of ALL of the world's information, reliance on the algorithm, scalability, targeted text ads, and an engineering rather than a business paradigm. He also covers the relationship between Google and its main competitors, Microsoft and Yahoo. I would not call this book a history of the company, nor an analysis, but rather a snapshot or a canvass of the current issues with some interesting background. Ten years from now what will a book about Google look like? Will it be made of paper and ink?

Google knows more about us than we may be comfortable with, but is it too much? As we place more of our lives "in the cloud," here's hoping they really mean it when they say "Don't be evil."

Linda Bulger, 2009

This is a piece of ephemera between hard covers. It is a generally satisfactory--although distinctly lightweight--overview of the first decade of Google, written by an industrious gleaner who has plainly put effort into seeking out and assimilating published sources but has had little luck in digging out inside details (not to mention dirt.)

This is a book for outsiders written by an outsider. It offers considerable virtues but they are all obviously time-dated. In a year or two, this will be stale history of a company that will have become something rather different from the Google in the book. In a decade, "Planet Google" will become a mere curiosity, like that one-time bestseller, "The Soul of a New Machine." In a century, perhaps, it will be the basis of a preface to a truly meaningful history of Google or of its successor(s).

If you are interested, grab "Planet Google" quickly, while it's still hot.

LEC/Am/1-09

Early in "Planet Google" Stross points out that Google's income reached $4.2 billion in 1997 - 99% from the simple text ads that accompany its search returns. Readers also learn that 68% of Internet searches use Google. Thus, one suspects that at least some of Google's current new activities (eg. creating a digital library of all books, providing video search capability, server-supplied software and central data storage, StreetView, translating between languages, voice-to-text capability) are a dangerous distraction from Google's main business (especially creating a digital library of all books - strongly fought by publishers and still lacking an income-generating plan, as well as the book. Similarly, video search is also opposed on copyright grounds, while StreetView has been lambasted as an invasion of privacy and aid to terrorists, GMail blasted as "creepy" for providing ads based on message content, and Google News also attacked on a copyright basis.

Stross also is oblivious to the fact that eventually other Internet-search engines will catch up with Google, its search services will become a much-cheaper commodity, and the company's ability to reward and retain staff will precipitously decline. (It's called "product-life cycle," taught in every business school, and there are no long-term antidotes.) Further, Stross woefully short-circuits a key current and future problem - Google's data-center energy costs - undoubtedly because Google doesn't want to discuss it. Finally, Google's page ranking and Web-searching algorithms do not receive enough attention, while "open" vs. "closed" source coding receives entirely too much.

Nonetheless, "Google Earth" is mostly interesting reading. Google's power derives from the accidental discovery, two years after its founding, that plain text ads on its search pages produce enormous profits. Another key innovation was its requiring that ads be directly relevant to the search and ranking them according to projected income to Google (bid/click X probability of being clicked).

Google's search engine did not start out perfect - 1998 queries sometimes took ten seconds. In 1999 the search engine reviewed only 60 million sites, but the company then aggressively set a goal for 1 billion - at the time, AltaVista, its largest competitor, indexed only 150 million. (Google indexed 8 billion Web pages by 2004, the last year it made data available.) Another important Google advantage was gained by choosing to use low-cost standard PCs as servers, vs. competitors' choosing more expensive, specialized machines. Still another important decision was to avoid human involvement in the search output, contrary to Yahoo, which of course eventually found this approach too slow and expensive.

Bottom Line: Google benefited from lucky and judicious decisions early in its history, as well as very well designed software; however, it now risks sliding downhill by trying to do too many things.

I was hoping for more details about the internals of the company and the founders. Some background info on their family's, how they were raised, etc. Not just a 'they went to school together'! How about some interviews with employees? Is it like a start up environment? Is it like a monolithic company that is hard to get things changed? Discussions of the 'free to spend time on whatever they want' and how google has a standard for how an employee spends their time? Etc, etc. Most of what I read it seemed like I already knew from news reports.

This is a really informative well written book. The author has an excellent understanding of Internet trends. He gives you many insights new to any layperson. The chapters are well structured and often stand independently. So, if you are interested about a specific topic you can jump ahead. The chapter titled "Unlimited Capacity" is a case in point. I had no idea Google ran such large computer farms in stealthy locations. Those cloud computing farms are populated by thousands of low cost computers that Google manufactures themselves! Who knew Google made their own computers!

At the onset Google founders were hell bent not relying on advertising. They accidentally fell into the key word text driven advertising concept. Google search-text advertising has created and dominated an ad market and generated billions of dollars in revenues for Google. The latter supports all their other products that are unprofitable.

Google has created several products to compete vs others. Most of them have failed. Google noticed that Wikipedia results ranked near the top of Google's search results. But, any search routed to Wikipedia represents lost advertising revenues for Google. So, Google created Knol where everyone can create articles just as in Wikipedia. But, with a Knol the author retains editing control. I have personally written and read articles at both websites. And, Wikipedia is far better and still does far better in search results. Google created Orkut, a social network, to compete with Facebook. And, Orkut has quickly become irrelevant.

Google may have created a game changer with Docs. Google introduced "Documents" a free web based competitor to MicroSoft very expensive PC based Office Suite. It has forced MicroSoft to reduce its prices. I personally use Documents more and more. I now write all my book reviews using Documents that I find more straightforward than Word. I also use its spreadsheet application often. Google may succeed in creating a centrally based alternative to MicroSoft PC centric world where many predecessors such as IBM and Oracle failed.

The chapter on "The Algorithm" confirms Google developed superior computer science behind its web search engine. Yahoo early on outsourced web searches to Google thinking web searches were worthless. The huge volume of web search Yahoo channelled Google's way became a competitive advantage for Google. Its search engine readily handles any scale, unlike its competitors who found the growing web overwhelming. And, the more data the algorithm crunched, the better its search performance. Google then tied the searches to text ads embedded on the side of searches and even figured for customers where to place adds to generate the most revenues for them and for Google. In doing that, Google leapfrogged the competition. And, the cash flow juggernaut (search text adds) was in place.

Google's algorithm approach had erratic results outside searches. The author suggests it has not worked well in news information aggregation (I am surprised, as I feel Google News is one of their most successful applications). On the other hand, the author indicates the same algorithm approach has been unexpectedly effective in language translation. And, Google has reached the top rank in language translation software competition for the toughest languages: Chinese or Arabic. And, it has achieved this feat with no native speakers! Instead, it has simply fed its software algorithm billions of matched documents (one version in English and the other in Chinese or Arabic) and let the software figure out the corresponding linguistic patterns. This has left the competition bedazzled.

The author indicates that several others of Google's ventures ran into difficulty. Google's ambitious goal of digitizing all the books in the World ran into copyright suits. It now lags far behind Amazon that has made many of its books searchable. Also, in video uploading and searches its product was so far behind YouTube that it decided to acquire YouTube for a staggering $1.65 billion. However, Google has not yet figured out how to generate an attractive return on this investment. YouTube videos with often inappropriate content do not cater well to Google search-ad text.

Google made another small acquisition that turned out hugely successful: Keyhole. The latter had developed the software capability to virtually fly and travel all over the world as shown in today's Google Earth. This allowed programmers to develop "mashups" that combine visual geographic information with data regarding restaurants, hotels, relevant ratings, home prices, etc... Successful users of such mashups include Zillow (home prices) and Yelp (consumer ratings of everything).

the book tells a great story about scale and prosperity. a good guide for young enterpreneurs