The Google Story (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Social phenomena happen, and the historians follow. So it goes with Google, the latest star shooting through the universe of trend-setting businesses. This company has even entered our popular lexicon: as many note, "Google" has moved beyond noun to verb, becoming an action which most tech-savvy citizens at the turn of the twenty-first century recognize and in fact do, on a daily basis. It's this wide societal impact that fascinated authors David Vise and Mark Malseed, who came to the book with well-established reputations in investigative reporting. Vise authored the bestselling The Bureau and the Mole, and Malseed contributed significantly to two Bob Woodward books, Bush at War and Plan of Attack. The kind of voluminous research and behind-the-scenes insight in which both writers specialize, and on which their earlier books rested, comes through in The Google Story.

The strength of the book comes from its command of many small details, and its focus on the human side of the Google story, as opposed to the merely academic one. Some may prefer a dryer, more analytic approach to Google's impact on the Internet, like The Search or books that tilt more heavily towards bits and bytes on the spectrum between technology and business, like The Singularity is Near. Those wanting to understand the motivations and personal growth of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt, however, will enjoy this book. Vise and Malseed interviewed over 150 people, including numerous Google employees, Wall Street analysts, Stanford professors, venture capitalists, even Larry Page's Cub Scout leader, and their comprehensiveness shows.

As the narrative unfolds, readers learn how Google grew out of the intellectually fertile and not particularly directed friendship between Page and Brin; how the founders attempted to peddle early versions of their search technology to different Silicon Valley firms for $1 million; how Larry and Sergey celebrated their first investor's check with breakfast at Burger King; how the pair initially housed their company in a Palo Alto office, then eventually moved to a futuristic campus dubbed the "Googleplex"; how the company found its financial footing through keyword-targeted Web ads; how various products like Google News, Froogle, and others were cooked up by an inventive staff; how Brin and Page proved their mettle as tough businessmen through negotiations with AOL Europe and their controversial IPO process, among other instances; and how the company's vision for itself continues to grow, such as geographic expansion to China and cooperation with Craig Venter on the Human Genome Project.

Like the company it profiles, The Google Story is a bit of a wild ride, and fun, too. Its first appendix lists 23 "tips" which readers can use to get more utility out of Google. The second contains the intelligence test which Google Research offers to prospective job applicants, and shows the sometimes zany methods of this most unusual business. Through it all, Vise and Malseed synthesize a variety of fascinating anecdotes and speculation about Google, and readers seeking a first draft of the history of the company will enjoy an easy read. --Peter Han

From Publishers Weekly

If Google's splashy IPO and skyrocketing stock haven't revived the dotcom sector, they have certainly revived the dotcom hype industry, judging by this adulatory history of the Internet search engine. Billionaire founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, their countercultural rectitude imbibed straight from the Burning Man festival, are brilliant visionaries dedicated to putting all information at mankind's fingertips and "genuinely nice people" who "didn't care about getting rich." Their company motto, "Don't Be Evil," is not just PR boilerplate rendered in fantasy-gaming rhetoric, but a deeply-pondered organizing principle. Washington Post reporter Vise, author of The Bureau and the Mole, and researcher Malseed give a serviceable rundown of the company's rise from grad-student project to web juggernaut, its innovative technology and targeted advertising system, its savvy deal-making and its inevitable battles with Microsoft. But while they raise the occasional quibble about controversial company policies, they generally allow Google's image of idealism to overshadow the reality of a corporate leviathan. Worse, the bloated text feels like the product of an overly broad web search: anything with keyword Google-executives' speeches, seminar talks, informal Q and A sessions with students, company press releases, legal documents, SEC filings, even the company chef's fried chicken recipe-comes up, excerpted at inordinate and rambling length, drowning insight in a flood of information.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Delacorte Press; First Edition. 1 in number line edition (November 15, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 055380457X
• ISBN-13: 978-0553804577
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (99 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #380,538 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

103 of 122 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, November 22, 2005

By	Christopher Tucher (Palo Alto, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If you've been reading the newspaper, there's not much new here. Vise skims over issues but doesn't help you understand them.

He describes Google's library project, but doesn't explain how these millions of books are to be scanned. He says "click fraud" is jeopardizing Google's advertising model, but he doesn't explain how these bots are created or how they can be stopped. Several times he tells us Sergei Brin is a great deal-maker, but he cites no good examples -- except that Brin once redirected the private jet to London to pull an AOL Europe deal out of the fire ... by dramatically sweetening his offer to outbid Yahoo.

There are many other examples where you'd expect greater insight or behind-the-scenes reporting. The auther doesn't seem to have gotten any inside access to the founders, the CEO, the VCs or any other key protagonist.

You do get, however, a recipe for fried chicken.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Written by an obvious fanboy, October 4, 2006

By	Neil Gunton (Eureka, CA) - See all my reviews

I'm sorry, but I can't read this book without breaking out into incredulous laughter on just about every page. The author is so over-the-top in his adoring descriptions of Google and its founders that I sometimes have difficulty not believing that it's some kind of parody. For example, the first lines of Chapter One: "Sergey Brin and Larry Page cruised onto the stage to the kind of roars and excitement that teenagers normally reserve for rock stars.". Ok, so I think, maybe that's just an accurate description of the event. But how about these quotes from the introduction: "Googleware and the lucrative Google ad system are a reflection of their genius and foresight"... (um, I'm pretty sure Overture was doing the paid ads thing before google)... or how about this, from the very first lines of the intro: "Not since Gutenberg invented the modern printing press more than 500 years ago, making books and scientific tomes affordable and widely available to the masses, has any new invention empowered individuals, and transformed access to information, as profoundly as Google.". Um, ok. So I guess Tim Berners Lee inventing the Web itself was a relatively minor occurance in the Googleverse. And there's more - from page 11: "In the rich and storied history of American invention and capitalism, there had never been a meteoric rise comparable to theirs. It had taken Thomas Edison a quarter of a century to invent the lightbulb; Alexander Graham Bell had spent many years developing the telephone; Henry Ford created the modern assembly line and turned it into the mass production and consumption of automobiles only after decades of work...". Ok, so now they are inventors who outshine Thomas Edison. Wow. I'm thinking, get a grip. It's a search engine. It worked pretty well (but is now being overtaken by spammers and other people gaming the system). They built a huge parallel computer system, which is great. They grew at a fast rate, which is fantastic. But let's face it, making a search engine that worked better than the competition isn't anywhere on the same scale of achievement as inventing the lightbulb, telephone, or mondern mass production methods. They are smart guys, but they aren't God's gift to the world. I'm sorry, but the tone of this book just completely throws me off. I bought it because I'm honestly interested in how Google came to be. But I feel like I'm being bombarded on every page by so much adulation for Google and its founders, that it starts to feel more like a religious tract than the history of a company.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Smell delicious. But where's the beef?, January 5, 2006

By	Winston Koh (Los Altos, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

We all know how Google get started. How Larry Page is originally working on his PhD thesis on search, and later with Sergey Brin, his stanford mate, founded Google. They, like many technology founders, didn't initially realize what a huge commercial opportunity they have in hand. They attempted to create a better, smarter search engine as an academic interest, a technical challenge instead as a commercial endeavor. Similar to the startings of Yahoo. Only in recent years, (and a huge thanks to Overture), did they find a reliable and extremely profitable revenue model through ads.

But most of the information and stories presented in the book are widely and openly available through a countless series of articles on Google. The author failed to present us with a fresh perspective or a more insider scope about the company.
The PageRank algorithm is awesome and played a huge role in the initial success of Google. But we need more insight into the creation and evolution of the ranking algorithms. It is certainly much more than finding the most popular links and displaying it first.

Eric Schmidt, the CEO shares his power with Larry and Sergey. It is by no means an easy task and I doubt this division of power could last. We need more management stories about power struggles, the dilemma faced by the CEO and the worries about the founders being able to veto the decision made by the CEO.

Google's computing infrastructure is one of the best in the world. With hundereds of thousands of servers, the processing power is really unbelievable and the kind of computer science problems that it could potentially solve is endless. Watch out 512-bit encryption, you could be cracked ;) I am hoping the author could give us more details and insights about the current computing infrastructure, how they come into being, the complications and how they might evolve to better serve the future.

I find the 'Don't be evil' mantra kinda funny. It's like 'Dont eat meat'. We all know it is a good thing, sounds like a religious mission, but don't give us much to go on. If a person has to be reminded to not do evil things everyday, what does that tell us about the person?

All in all, it is a decent book. For those fascinated by Google and don't follow industry news that much, it could be an interesting read. But don't hope for juicy untold stories not found elsewhere, or insider stories about internal workings or disgruntled ex-employees complaining about the problems of Google. You will be left disappointed.