Product Description

"Here is the story behind one of the most remarkable Internet successes of our time. Based on scrupulous research and extraordinary access to Google, the book takes you inside the creation and growth of a company whose name is a favorite brand and a standard verb recognized around the world. Its stock is worth more than General Motors’ and Ford’s combined, its staff eats for free in a dining room that used to be run by the Grateful Dead’s former chef, and its employees traverse the firm’s colorful Silicon Valley campus on scooters and inline skates.

The Google Story is the definitive account of the populist media company powered by the world’s most advanced technology that in a few short years has revolutionized access to information about everything for everybody everywhere.

In 1998, Moscow-born Sergey Brin and Midwest-born Larry Page dropped out of graduate school at Stanford University to, in their own words, “change the world” through a search engine that would organize every bit of information on the Web for free.

While the company has done exactly that in more than one hundred languages, Google’s quest continues as it seeks to add millions of library books, television broadcasts, and more to its searchable database.

Readers will learn about the amazing business acumen and computer wizardry that started the company on its astonishing course; the secret network of computers delivering lightning-fast search results; the unorthodox approach that has enabled it to challenge Microsoft’s dominance and shake up Wall Street. Even as it rides high, Google wrestles with difficult choices that will enable it to continue expanding while sustaining the guiding vision of its founders’ mantra: DO NO EVIL."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #123377 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-29
• Released on: 2006-08-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

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

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
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