Google and the Mission to Map Meaning and Make Money (Paperback)

~ Bart Stephen Milner (Author) "It was 3.15 am Greenwich mean time, hour of the wolf, 30th April 2004 when an email newsfeed finally appeared on Google's Initial Public Offering..." (more)
Key Phrases: contextual advertising, desktop search, context mapping, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Stefanie Olsen (more...)

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Product Description

This book is a brief history of Cyberspace and Google's fundamental contribution - a new search method that gives almost immediate access to the contents of billions of web pages.

It covers the the rivalry with Yahoo! - once their closest partners, the competition with Microsoft and the success that made Google's 2004 launch on NASDAQ inevitable and the struggle by the company's founders to prevent that success from ruining their vision of how a 21st century engineering enterprise should be organised.

It traces the origins of the Internet in the work of Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee and the serendipity of the Google founders' breakthrough discovery of a technology of hypertextual and contextual search developed at Stanford University, after the failure of dozens of earlier Search engines, and their subsequent development of targetted advertising which is already fundamentally transforming the future profits of both the Internet and printed newspapers and magazines industries.

Purchasing the book gives access to the online edition at fleetworks.info which contains more than 500 links to some of the most important work published on the history of the Internet and Google's Search technology.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Wherefore by their fruits (and roots) ye shall know them...

It was 3.15 am Greenwich mean time, hour of the wolf, 30th April 2004 when an email newsfeed finally appeared on Google's Initial Public Offering (IPO), which would take the company into public sale on Wall Street. The Financial Times had posted 1 up links to the IPO filing to the SEC (Security and Exchange Commission) and Larry Page's users' manual 2. Sixty pages later, as dawn broke over London, it was clear that they had done their maths, and figured the engineering. They were safe and on their way. At about the same time, the spacecraft Cassini arrived at Saturn 3 , having used the gravity of Venus and Jupiter to power its slingshot 4 trajectory since its launch in 1997. Google's pilots: founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Eric Schmidt, are undertaking a similar manoeuvre in cyberspace; instead of being sucked into what sf writer William Gibson 5 has called "a black hole... the unthinkable gravitic tug of Big Money" they are using the force of their multi-billion dollar IPO to power the next stage of their jaw-dropping journey into hypertext, context and meaning.

Although Cassini's flight had looked almost flawless, in 2004 fingers were still crossed for the success of its European Space Agency probe Huygens, particularly after the Genesis probe crashed into the Utah desert at 193 mph in September, because the parachute switches were installed backwards. When they discovered that Huygens was using a different radio frequency from Cassini, NASA remedied it by remote engineering over a billion miles, but might not have wanted advice from the world's press at the time.

Wobbling around Venus

Google were not so fortunate in their own transit of Venus. When they failed to schedule the publication of an Interview with Playboy outside the SEC-designated 'quiet period', they found, as in the Irish joke, that the eyes of the Skibbereen Eagle and every other news channel on the planet were upon them.

They should have enforced a later publishing date, but the Playboy interview is an American rite-of-passage, a mainstream statement that shows the jocks from high school who really calls the shots. More seriously their July price estimate and volume had to be diverted sharply downward for the August IPO, which jumped 18% on the first day of trading, finally giving Wall Street the bonus it craved, unearned unless you count the work done on the barrage of negative publicity, fuelled by Google's own exaggerated errors, which helped scare off retail investors.

A new light

But it is probably fair to say that the Black Hole of an IPO did little more than rattle Google's insulation tiles, the real journey will now follow. After the first day of trading the Wall Street Journal's headline was "Google's Debut is Considered a Success". (Their second headline was: "Google's Wealth Could Bring Woes" - gee, thanks, guys.) The FT's Lex gave what the Trotskyists used to call 'Critical support in struggle':

Wall Street will see the auction as a failure. Execution was poor. Strong vested interests and tough markets made life even harder. However, Google did get listed and its unconventionality shone light on important areas. James Surowiecki of the New Yorker was even more forthright in an FT Comment article entitled Ignore Wall St's whining - Google's IPO worked:

Wall Street can spin this however it wants. But Google went public without the marketing support of a major investment bank, without handing out favours to well-connected executives and without dictating a price in the manner of Soviet central planners. Because it did, it now has hundreds of millions of dollars that it would not otherwise have had. By any standard, this was one IPO that worked.

No concessions

Money loves only money, and if Google ever runs out of cash, expect the banks to be gleeful to the point of sadism as they dispatch the management and, almost certainly, break up the company. But, same difference really, even if Google had, like previous dot.coms permitted Wall street to make obscene profits out of its IPO, it would still get the same treatment if it ever mismanages its income flow.

The founders' founding ideals of free, unbiased, fast, public Internet Search would then be repeated publicly, before being ignored behind closed corporate doors, because the short-term profits from Search bias are so big, particularly if, like Google, you have a huge brand based on honesty. That remains a threat. Yahoo! survived as a company following its IPO, true, but only after not only its founders had been replaced, but the "professional" management demanded by Wall Street had themselves been purged. That's not what Page and Brin intend to let happen, if they can fight to prevent it. So far so good.

This is partly a battle for America's soul; whether the country returns to the hugely ambitious, ingenious engineering, which has been its hallmark, or follows the Enron route to making money by gambling with its own, and other people's, primary assets. Having survived the dot.con boom, Google's management share with the whole IT industry the knowledge that financial speculation in tech shares has done nothing but damage to anybody except the tiny minority of individuals and companies who won the sweepstake of other peoples' investment.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: The Electric Book Company (November 22, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1843279983
• ISBN-13: 978-1843279983
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,489,952 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

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59 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Utterly unreadable, June 7, 2005

By	xMac (Boston) - See all my reviews

Is this book meant to be a joke? It is almost utterly unreadable, full of overly-long runon sentences, each of which is comprised solely of gibberish. It's bad enough that the author can't write, but where were the editors during all this? I'd give this book 0 stars if only Amazon made it possible. But credit Milner for one thing: This is the first Amazon book purchase I've ever made that I will return, and immediately. What a waste of time.