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The Google Story |  |
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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.
From AudioFile
Narrated with classy restraint by Stephen Hoye, this story is so exciting it's inescapable. Two precocious sons of professors, one with unbounded curiosity about all things mathematical and the other with an uncanny gift for deal making, created the search engine that revolutionized how we find things on the World Wide Web. Their unconventional story of humor, social responsibility, and relentless curiosity rises above most dot-com sagas because the protagonists are so entertaining. From their beginnings at Stanford through the initial public offering and all the turf wars and intellectual challenges that followed, the story of how these two characters became gazillionaires is totally engaging. T.W. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
Vise, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Washington Post, and Malseed, contributor to the Post and the Boston Herald, look at a phenomenon that is transforming the culture of the planet. Google has become the de facto search engine on the Web, and computer users across the globe have discovered that the only real way to gain entrance to the Web is to "google." This inside look at this heretofore-secret enterprise reveals a company with a conscience, one that refuses to put ads on its home page or accept ads from gun and cigarette manufacturers, and whose employees eat for free in a dining room run by the former chef of the Grateful Dead. The company motto is, Don't Be Evil. Developed by two Stanford University PhD students in the mid-1990s, Google was a by-product of their attempt to download the entire Internet, but it became an instant hit with the world. The authors follow the story of Google from academic project to venture capital start-up to the explosive Wall Street IPO in 2004. David Siegfried
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
