Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know

by Randall E. Stross

Book Overview

"In this spellbinding behind-the-scenes look, Stross leads readers through Google's evolution...the unfolding narrative reads like a suspense novel" (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Based on unprecedented access to the "Googleplex," Planet Google goes deep inside the company to unveil the extraordinary scope and scale of its ambition to become the master gate-keeper of "all the world's information," including...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1416546960
• ISBN13: 9781416546962
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: Free Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Don't be evil

The phenomenon known as Google had its beginnings in a Stanford University dorm room. Graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin intended at first only to search web pages and index them. From the beginning, Google had no air of the corporate world about it. Their model is based in the engineering world: define a problem and it can be solved. Their informal company slogan? "Don't be evil." Brin's and Page's vision was to organize all the world's information, and to do it strictly according to computer code that weights and ranks web pages to determine their places in search results. Google relied from the beginning on the principle of letting the computer program -- "the algorithm" -- do the ranking of pages. Strict reliance on the algorithm has allowed Google to "scale" rapidly -- that is, index huge amounts of new information and accommodate rapid spikes in the number of searches performed by users. Three years ago the company revealed that it had crawled and indexed 8 billion pages, but no updates have been forthcoming since then. How do they pay for it? Advertising. Brin and Page initially believed that advertising was a sure path to biased results and wanted no part of it for their search engine. In 2000, however, they began to experiment with text ads targeted to the search terms, contracting with advertisers who would pay a price per click. The money rolled in, funding enormous expansion. The company approach to insuring capacity has been unique and uniquely successful; they are the McDonald's of the tech world; all in the name of scalability. Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know is organized along product lines. Chapters are devoted to the following initiatives: (1) The mission to digitize all books in and out of print, a product now known as Google Book Search (the company's self-described "moon shot"); (2) The foresighted acquisition of YouTube; (3) The product line containing Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Street View; and (4) "Cloud computing." "Cloud computing," or Software as a Service, refers to the concept of standard personal and office-type applications residing "in the cloud" -- on the web -- rather than on the user's PC. These are the applications that Microsoft "owns" and Google has begun going head to head with the giant: Google Calendar, Google Documents and Spreadsheets, and especially Google Mail. A full gig of storage ensured that users could save all their e-mail, all searchable. How to pay for it, and for the redundancy to avoid loss of data? Google Ads, of course. Consumers quailed at the targeted text ads, so closely linked to the content of their e-mails, but a bigger barrier to mail and apps "in the cloud" is the legal requirement on companies to preserve and manage all e-mail and internal documents. This one is still evolving. New York Times columnist Randall Stross gives a good flavor of the company culture, and of the principles that have paid off so hugely

Balanced, non-technical overview of Google's rise

I received this book as a gift concerned that it only lavish praise on Google. What I found was balanced journalism highlighting both positives and negatives of Google's rise up until the moment the book was published. I'm a professional website developmer myself, but appreciated the relatively light level of technical detail that the book went into. It makes for an accessible, interesting read that doesn't get bogged down in engineering details. I recommend the book for those in the web industry to fill in the gaps of the backstory of what has become the most powerful business in our industry.

For those interested in what Google has been up to

For readers who appreciated The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, this book loosely picks up where the former book sort of left off. "The Search" (by different author and published in 2005) covers the origin and growth of general Web search technology and the rise of Google the company up to the point shortly after its IPO. "Planet Google" mainly takes a look at what the company has been doing since (circa 2004-08) and focuses on Google's many attempted forays into products and technologies beyond the core Web search. A chapter is dedicated for each of Google's better-known endeavors, namely book digitization, video/YouTube, Google Earth/Maps, datacenter buildup, Gmail and privacy issues, the go for open-source everything, and the debate of machine-only vs. human-assisted search algorithm. The author claims to enjoy fairly generous access to Google's facilities and some of its top executives, including CEO Eric Schmidt. The book provides a quick read and is much shorter than the number of pages would suggest as the last 75 pages contain only massive amount of footnotes. It will certainly delight those who have always been fascinated by everything Google.

Interesting, but Too Inclusive!

Early in "Planet Google" Stross points out that Google's income reached $4.2 billion in 2997 - 99% from the simple text ads that accompany its search returns. Readers also learn that 68% of Internet searches use Google. Thus, one suspects that at least some of Google's current new activities (eg. creating a digital library of all books, providing video search capability, server-supplied software and central data storage, StreetView, translating between languages, voice-to-text capability) are a dangerous distraction from Google's main business (especially creating a digital library of all books - strongly fought by publishers and still lacking an income-generating plan, as well as the book. Similarly, video search is also opposed on copyright grounds, while StreetView has been lambasted as an invasion of privacy and aid to terrorists, GMail blasted as "creepy" for providing ads based on message content, and Google News also attacked on a copyright basis. Stross also is oblivious to the fact that eventually other Internet-search engines will catch up with Google, its search services will become a much-cheaper commodity, and the company's ability to reward and retain staff will precipitously decline. (It's called "product-life cycle," taught in every business school, and there are no long-term antidotes.) Further, Stross woefully short-circuits a key current and future problem - Google's data-center energy costs - undoubtedly because Google doesn't want to discuss it. Finally, Google's page ranking and Web-searching algorithms do not receive enough attention, while "open" vs. "closed" source coding receives entirely too much. Nonetheless, "Google Earth" is mostly interesting reading. Google's power derives from the accidental discovery, two years after its founding, that plain text ads on its search pages produce enormous profits. Another key innovation was its requiring that ads be directly relevant to the search and ranking them according to projected income to Google (bid/click X probability of being clicked). Google's search engine did not start out perfect - 1998 queries sometimes took ten seconds. In 1999 the search engine reviewed only 60 million sites, but the company then aggressively set a goal for 1 billion - at the time, AltaVista, its largest competitor, indexed only 150 million. (Google indexed 8 billion Web pages by 2004, the last year it made data available.) Another important Google advantage was gained by choosing to use low-cost standard PCs as servers, vs. competitors' choosing more expensive, specialized machines. Still another important decision was to avoid human involvement in the search output, contrary to Yahoo, which of course eventually found this approach too slow and expensive. Bottom Line: Google benefited from lucky and judicious decisions early in its history, as well as very well designed software; however, it now risks sliding downhill by trying to do too many things.

Google is getting as big as a planet

This was a great book. Written in lay mans terms, this book is a macro view of google - from birth pangs to its 10th year birthday. Google has been a company which has been a source of inspiration and intrigue for the past decade. Like all big firms, it has had its fair share of problems (legal and competition wise) but it is still standing. The book talks about all the steps Google has taken to follow it initial mantra of getting all the data in the world together and indexed. From youtube to keyhole to its documents software to its news reader, this book briefly talks about all of googles achievements. This is not a book which talks in depth about the life of google but it does give the reader a glimpse of one of the most innovative and exciting companies in the world.