Only 10 years after the two founders of Google met each other, it’s hard to imagine life without the Internet search engine whose name has become a popular verb.
“The Google Story,” by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, reveals the source of the magic as it chronicles the company’s history from the 1995 meeting of founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page as graduate students at Stanford to current concerns about competing with Microsoft for the Chinese market and cataloging human genes.
“The Google Story” describes how the search engine is powered by numerous computers wired together that, combined, have the entire contents of the Internet downloaded onto them. When this concept was first developed in a Stanford computer lab, the pioneering search engine – then competing against search engines like
AltaVista that no one remembers anymore – was known as “BackRub.” (And some people think getting “googled” by strangers is creepy.)
The current moniker is a misspelling of “googol,” which is the term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes.
According to book-jacket notes, Vise is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The Washington Post. This is not surprising after reading the smooth and lively prose. Vise and Malseed use an impressive variety of sources that add to the book’s credibility.
Some of the chapters about the early years of the company drag a bit, packed with too many names and numbers, but the book shines in its descriptions of how Google products, such as Gmail and Google News, came to be.
Details about the company’s free-form culture are humorous and just as colorful as the search page’s logo. Charlie Ayers, the chef Brin and Page hired to provide free meals for Google employees, gets a whole chapter. The book also contains this comment about the 2004 remodel of the main Google compound in northern California: “Bathrooms have extravagant touchpad-controlled toilets with six levels of heat for the seat and automated washing, drying and flushing without the need for toilet paper.”
That’s almost too much information about what gets done with the billions of dollars Google makes when people click on the sponsored links that run alongside search results. Vise and Malseed do a good job of capturing Google’s growing pains as it tries to retain its initial creative culture while becoming a publicly-traded company.
The book’s appendixes are also some of its best parts. One provides suggestions for how to get the most out of the Google search engine and another is the Google Labs Aptitude Test, which was originally posted on the Google blog for people to test their knowledge of the Google company and computer programming. The test is frustratingly hard if taken seriously, but some of the questions are pretty funny, and answers are posted online at www.thegooglestory.com.
This book is a good read for anyone who relies on Google technology and wants to understand how it works. Learning the details of how it came to be makes the perfectly relevant pages of search results generated for most queries on the search engine seem slightly less magical, but it’s almost more remarkable to find out how two human beings pulled it off.
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