• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

BOOK REVIEW: 'Google' Story Much Blander Than Actual Phenomenon

Posted on: Saturday, 3 December 2005, 06:00 CST

By Christopher Steffen

By Christopher Steffen
Oklahoma Daily ( U. Oklahoma )

(U-WIRE) NORMAN, Okla. -- Business books tend to be dry, bland and generally less than enthralling to the general book-reading public. "The Google Story" stays deeply entrenched in this tradition -- we wouldn't want to make the story of one of the most interesting companies of the last decade to be as unique as the company itself - it's best to stick with tradition on this one. It's frustrating that such a good story -- a couple of guys decide they'll download the entire Internet so they can index it, become billionaires in the process and scare the crap out of little companies like Microsoft -- is watered down to the point to where it feels like reading a 300-page press release. The authors are remarkably uncritical of Google and some of the issues that have plagued it as its services have expanded -- specifically, user privacy and problems that stem from Google hosting so much of its users' information on its own servers. These topics are brought up, but their implications are simply brushed off with a flurry of praising adjectives that continue to extol the greatness of Google's founders. Every possible accolade is bestowed upon Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and eventually it gets so over the top that I wouldn't have been surprised to see them described as 'dashingly handsome' or 'god-like' somewhere in the book. The glowing storytelling grows old fast, and is so extreme that one wonders if the authors were more worried about looking good in the eyes of their subjects than producing an unbiased, comprehensive account of one of the Internet's biggest money-makers. What's most surprising about the book is that such a puff piece was put together by two pretty qualified individuals -- Vice has a Pulitzer Prize to his name, and Malseed has written for several top-tier papers and been one of Bob Woodward's main researchers. Perhaps Malseed is betrayed by his research abilities, since the book seems more interested in presenting as much information as possible instead of stringing it together in an insightful way. Even some of the research doesn't seem to go far enough -- and perhaps this is because Google is tightlipped about some of its methods, but some of the biggest and seemingly most interesting points about the internal architecture and creation of the search engine are left up to the reader's guess. How did they actually download the entire Internet? How does their system continue to index developing Web pages? How is all this stored? How much do they pay for bandwidth costs? There's so much potentially interesting information that isn't presented in "The Google Story," and what is there -- stories about the company's chief, the staff going to the Burning Man festival and other miscellanea that tries to lighten the book by making it more anecdotal -- takes a front seat to the real meat of the story of one of the most interesting and dynamic companies to survive the bursting of the dot-com bubble.

(C) 2005 Oklahoma Daily via U-WIRE

Source: U-WIRE

More News in this Category