 THE GOOGLE STORY—INSIDE THE HOTTEST BUSINESS, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY SUCCESS OF OUR TIMEBY
DAVID A. VISEMACMILLAN
RS 595; PAGES: 326 |
It works well, it's fast, it's free and remarkably, it gets better the more you use it—it is actually intelligent. Google search is one of the great business success stories of the past decade. The start-up investment of $1 million by co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin has grown to close to $50 billion—despite early years that coincided with the financial chaos of the dotcom bust.
Google's genius is twofold. It has a better understanding of computer networks and how to retrieve useful information within them than any of its predecessors. The company has also worked out how to get useful data of its free service from users. If you use Google a lot, everything you search for, whatever you show an online interest in is accumulating in a database somewhere. One day it will contain enough information on you to provide an eerily accurate cyber image of your tastes and preferences. Google's primary intention is not to snoop on you, though governments like that of the US have already taken note of its potential, not to mention every business interested in online marketing.
Instead, what it has developed is a globally distributed platform for net-based transactions between all sorts of buyers and sellers. There is no better way to extract value from such networks than search—and Google has the best. Taken forward logically, Google actually has the potential to become the world's marketplace for everything.
That's an ominous thought for a company founded on a credo of "Do no evil", one that was cheered by people for its ability to take on industry behemoths like Microsoft. It's also why this engrossing book by Vise, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter, is timely, because it offers a fascinating insight into one of the world's most unusual and influential companies at precisely the point that it turns from being an anarchic people's favourite into a corporate giant.