The Google Story

Title: The Google Story

Author: David A Vise

Publisher: MacMillan 2005 (First)

ISBN: 1-4050-5371-2

Pages: 306

Google is the search engine par excellence in today’s net world. There is no substitute for it and it has become to the Internet what mouse is to a PC user. Every netizen visits the site at least once a day. Google has a domineering presence in contextual ad delivery and its tentacles reach far and wide, across continents and cultures. The company is young, founded only in 1998 by two students of Stanford University, doing their PhD courses! The enchanting story of the birth of this internet juggernaut is captively narrated by David A Vise, who is a renowned journalist and author for more than two decades and has won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990. The Google Story is his best seller published in more than 20 languages. The book is aptly packaged in the primary-colour scheme of the Google homepage which makes the design simple, elegant and eye-catching.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page, developed an algorithm for fast and relevant web searching while doing their PhD work in Stanford University. Brin was born in former Soviet Union and his parents migrated to the U.S. in 1980 to escape anti-semitism at home. The developed algorithm, called PageRank was very effective and was based on relevance of the content and not in the repetition of keywords or tags in the text. The search engine was an instant hit in the University intranet and the young developers registered a company to market the idea. ‘Google’ was in fact the incorrectly spelled word ‘Googol’ which represents a very large number, the digit 1 succeeded by 100 zeroes. Brin and Page wanted to sell the patent to a competitor and to return to the academic field to complete their coursework. Altavista, Yahoo, Excite and a few others, who were the leaders in internet search at that time didn’t find the software worthwhile to part with $1 million which was the humble asking price of the inventors. Search was not an activity the behemoths thought would prevail in the connected world because of the transience of the operation, as the user would immediately move on to the suggested results. This didn’t go well with their business idea of keeping the users spending more time on their site. Disappointed, but not losing heart, Brin and Page started the company with a capital little more than $1 million and Google was incorporated on Sep 7, 1998 as a privately funded company.

Google generates its lightning fast response to search queries based on a combination of software and hardware. Mainly it runs of inexpensive PCs interoperated in a proprietory way and searches its archives consisting of 50 billion web pages. This unique combination of hardware and software is often called Googleware. Even though inexpensive, the huge clusters of machines required considerable investment which prompted the founders to seek and obtain a fresh infusion of $25 million in cash from Kleiner Perkins ad Sequoia Capital, two venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. Under the terms of the agreement, Brin and Page had to appoint Eric Schmidt, a sharp and savvy business executive in July 2001 to attend to the day-to-day functioning of the company.

The year 2000 was rife with aspirations of the budding dot-com industry which saw hundreds of net-enabled firms rise to multibillion dollar status overnight. But there was not much time for the bubble to burst. Many of them went bankrupt, with lots of talented software engineers suddenly available without jobs. This was a great opportunity for Google as it grew from strength to strength and their profits soared. Soon, Yahoo tied up with Google to power their own net search confirming the superiority of the product. Even though being the undisputed leader of internet search, there was no money earning proposition in Google’s business strategy. This was addressed in 2002, and it started to provide context-based text-ads along with the search results. Whenever a user clicked on these ‘sponsored links’, Google obtained money which ranged from a few pennies to about $10 per click. The young company’s coffers burgeoned with cash and the time came to take it to the public domain with an IPO as stipulated by legislation.

Google went public in August 2004 with an IPO, claiming $85 per share. They sought to raise $2.71828 billion from the market and this number itself is a way of measuring the quirkiness of the founders, both of them mathematicians and computer engineers. The number 2.71828 is called Euler’s number and is designated by the letter ‘e’ in mathematics. It is also the base of natural logarithm! Also when an additional tranche of 14,159,265 shares were made available for the market in August 2005, the world witnessed another mathematical trick. The number represents the first eight digits of the decimal part of the number ‘pi’.

The ongoing projects undertaken by the company is digitization of the content of world’s prominent libraries and data search and retrieval for human genetic program, details of which are not given in the book. These projects are also motivated by the desire to disseminate information across the world and self-explains the company’s motto, ‘Don’t be evil’. However, reading about its deal with AOL Europe in 2004 makes the reader suspicious of the founders’ commitment to their ideal. The incident goes like this. In October of that year, AOL invited bids from Yahoo and Google for providing search facility for its operations in Europe. Both the rivals submitted quotes and finding Yahoo’s bid to be greater, AOL decided to award the contract to them and informally conveyed the matter to Yahoo. Brin and Page got wind of the deal and instantly flew in to London to meet AOL Europe’s CEO and offered a substantial increase over Yahoo’s bid to snatch the deal. To be fair, AOL invited Yahoo to submit a fresh bid, but they were reluctant to offer the very big amount Google had promised. Such a blatant act in violation of corporate ethics can hardly be expected from a company which takes pride in its motto of ‘Don’t be evil’! Another tainted practice followed by Google was to snare away employees from its rival, Microsoft. It seemed once that Bill Gates had become the recruiting agent for Google! Law suits ensued between the giants in 2005 over the hiring of Dr. Kai-fu Lee, a top level executive of Microsoft who had in-depth of knowledge of its strategies in China. Google employed him to oversee their initiatives in China. A U.S. court restrained Google from such practices.

The book is really to easy to read and follow. The focusing of key players and analyzing their contributions in detail gives the reader a very good grasp of the hectic and complex business deals associated with big-ticket corporate houses. The coverage extends even to Charlie Ayres, former chef at Google whose pioneering activities in campus help spread the image of a free flowing, family-like organization as judged from the good quality free food provided to the employees. But in this case, the coverage far exceeded what was expected by the scope of the book as seen by the detailed recipe of buttermilk fried chicken printed in full! There was no need to put in such an irrelevant one! The author has included 23 very helpful tips while searching in Google in an appendix and every net surfer will benefit by carefully following the advice given. The sample GLAT (Google Labs Aptitude Test) given in another appendix and vouch for some entertaining brain racking! (I, however, failed to answer even one of them, but let’s push that under the carpet!).

There are, however, a handful of points to showcase on the negative side. The flow of the thread is not smooth as it is significantly interrupted even inside and between chapters. The author doesn’t give the final outcome of a maneuvre in a chapter. The library digitization project may be taken as an example. In the chapter allotted to it, we get the impression that Google is spearheading it, but in a later chapter, it is declared that it has temporarily shelved the project. The latest position was given almost as a footnote. The author is in the habit of dropping prominent characters between chapters make readers difficult to remember the people who built up the organization as most of the names are not mentioned in any context later in the book. This may be the reason why the flow is broken sometimes. The ordinary reader also gets the impression that a lot of space could have been saved by condensing some of the portions. Large coverage is given for simple matters too and it is quite possible to illustrate the story in 150 pages as opposed to the 292 it had in this edition. The information seemed old, because 5 years have passed since the publication of the title. 5 years means 40% of the total lifespan of Google till date, so that’s a huge disadvantage. The readability of some chapters are not commendable, while in general, it is very good.

There is an inconsistent remark made about searching something using plurals. On page 294 in Appendix 1, it is declared that Google does not make a distinction between a word and its plural, like dance, dances, and dancing. This is contrary to the idea given earlier, where it is seen that, “She juggled bids, for example, on the term “digital camera” and its plural, “digital cameras” – with the cost of a click on the second averaging $1.08 compared to about 75 cents for the first. The reason for the disparity, she said, was that customers who typed in the plural were more likely to end up as buyers” (p.116). This is, of course, the experience of a client of Google, but the difference in pricing shows that Google indeed differentiates between a word and its plural.

The book is eminently readable, even though business matters form the bulk of the material covered, with practically nothing technical. It is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star