The Google Story (Book Review)
During the electronic revolution, Google sprang about as the most indispensable search engine almost overnight. If there is anybody on the face of this planet who hasn’t heard of Google, I think he must be a relic from the Stone Age.
The book, The Google Story, is about the birth and the coming of age of this marvel of a company. Its founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, met in Stanford in 1995. Despite the earlier differences between them, they connected well because they shared a vision and a bright but goofy character. Sergey, the math whiz and a first-generation Russian- American, is the son of Michael Brin, a math teacher in the University of Maryland, and Eugenia Brin, a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Larry’s father, Carl Victor Page, was a computer engineer and he introduced his children to the world of computers early on. Although Larry’s mother was Jewish, Larry knew more about computers than Judaism.
During 1996, Larry and Sergey teamed up to analyze Web links as research toward a PH. D. thesis. Since this work took longer than anticipated, Larry came up with the theory of counting the number of links to a website could be a way of ranking that website’s popularity. Later on, they applied the Page Rank to the Internet. By early 1997, a primitive search engine called BackRub was developed. During the autumn of 1997, BackRub earned a new name, Google, derived from the googol a mathematical term, which means a number equal to 1 followed by 100 zeros and is expressed as 10 to the 100th power.
After its initial beginnings, the development of Google as a company reminds me of any small cottage industry that can abruptly grow in leaps and bounds to take over its industry sector. If Thomas Edison is called the genius of Menlo Park, Sergey and Larry, too, may be called genius-wizards of Menlo Park, because like Edison, they rented a large house in Menlo Park from where to continue the expansion of their company. Menlo Park became the nest from which Google the research project became Google.com.
One bright idea that led Google to its present day success was the idealism of its founders. During the heyday of the dot com companies, Sergey and Larry preferred to keep the company private as long as they possibly could because they wanted to build the best search engine; the money they could gain by making the company public was not so important.
Still, the company needed cash to expand, especially after moving to the new company headquarters in Palo Alto, and on June 1999, Sergey Brin and Larry Page announced that two venture capital companies, Kleiner Perkins and Sequioa Capital, had agreed to invest $25 million dollars in Google with their managers Doerr and Moritz joining Google’s board of directors. With this announcement, the Google revolution started taking roots.
Not all went without a glitch. For example, in 2004, there was the legal action against a UK company Booble.com, imitating Google but with a sexual content. Then, when Google finally went public, it attracted a trademark lawsuit from Geico.
As such, the authors go on to tell many stories about the company and even its chef who prepares the food for the staff.
At the end of the book, Brin suggests improving the brain by plugging a version of Google into it. That will certainly be the next wonderful surprise Google can grant its users.
The Google Story is in hardcover with 326 pages. In the front of the book, a contents page showing its 26 chapters is followed by an Introduction, and at the end of the book, are the appendices such as Google Search Tips, Google Labs Aptitude Test, and Google’s Financial Scorecard, plus A Note on Sources, Acknowledgments, Photo Credits and Index. A few black and white photos in the middle of the book add to its enjoyment as well as the variety of anecdotes inside it. This book is also available as an abridged audio CD, an abridged downloadable audiobook, and a trade paperback.
The writers of the book David A. Vise and Mark Malseed are reporters. David A.Vise, a Washington Post reporter, has won the Pulitzer Prize and is the author of three books, one a bestseller “The Bureau and the Mole.” Mark Malseed is a contributing reporter to the Boston Herald and the Washington Post and has done some valuable research for two of Bob Woodard’s books.
For me, this was an enjoyable read with one tale after another. Although the information in it has been in the news media before, seeing it in one piece was a treat.
Book Review – Google Speaks by Janet Lowe
For those who cannot get through the day without using Google to search out an item on the Internet, Google Speaks is an enlightening book to read. The story of Sergey Brin, a young Russian immigrant, and Larry Page, described as a typical American boy in most ways, this book is, also, the story of the founding of Google, a company designated by Time magazine in 2006 as the smartest company of the year.
Author Janet Lowe brings out some revealing facts about the young entrepreneurs, including the information that both Sergey and Larry attended Montessori elementary schools. The educational methods of Maria Montessori seemed to have shaped both Sergey and Larry, Lowe writes. The two gifted young men later met as Stanford graduate students, and what began as a college research project developed into an amazing company.
Lowe’s book details the growth of Google and tells about many of the people involved in the company’s phenomenal developement. It also tells how the name Google came to be. Larry and Sergey intended to name the company googol which is the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. However, someone misspelled the word as Google which Lowe terms a blessed blunder.
Among the many unique projects described in the book, is a collaboration between Google and NASA to provide high-resolution lunar imagery and maps to the Google Moon program. The book also tells about a copyright infringement dispute with the Authors Guild and others when Google began scanning and copying millions of books in library collections.
The Timeline and Glossary sections in the back provide excellent references for the reader. Google Speaks is a wealth of information. It is a book that everyone who enjoys using the Internet should read.
Google Books – Online Literacy Database
The idea of Google Books was first conceived in 2002 when a small group of Google programmers started pondering the question of how many man hours it would take to scan every single book ever written. We still don’t know the true answer to this question although just eight years from the idea conception there are now over 10 million books catalogued in their database.
While the first scan was done manually on a 300 page book and took 40 minutes to process, Google now use cameras capable of scanning at a rate of 1,000 pages an hour and also work with 20,000 publisher partners who provide content directly. They have also been able to provide over 1 million books that can be read in full from cover to cover; these unrestricted works are either books that have fallen out of copyright or have been provided with publishers express permission.
As well as simply scanning the books, Google performs OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on the pages, thereby turning them in to pure text which can be entered in to their database. As a result when you do a Google Search you are now not only returned results from relevant websites but also your search terms are checked against a library encompassing millions of books and appropriate matches are suggested for further reading.
The integration in to the Google Search engine means you may have already inadvertently stumbled across Google Books but if you haven’t and are eager to explore then the Google Books can be found by simply performing a search for ‘Google Books’. Being a Google service, it almost goes without saying that the service is completely free of charge and is instead paid for via a minimal number of sponsored links which are in no way intrusive or detrimental to the service.
From the Google Books site you can perform searches, add books to your virtual library or organise your collection in a logical manner. Searching for a book and then subsequently clicking on it opens an interface which allows you to either view the directly scanned pages from the book or in some instances a ‘plain text’ version. This plain text can then be copied and passed to another application or simply printed out for reading offline.
Books still under copyright enjoy the protection of a variety of access limitations and security measures which limit the number of viewable pages making the experience somewhat akin to being able to flick through the first couple of pages in a library or bookshop. Despite this protection there have rather predictably been a number of fairly major lawsuits issued by individuals and publishers alike; some with legitimate grievances and others just seeking money or publicity.
Possibly the most notable case was between The Authors Guild, the publishing industry and Google which resulted in Google agreeing to a settlement on October 28, 2008. This would see them pay a total $125 million not only to pay the court costs of the plaintiffs but also create a Book Rights Registry which will collect and disburse revenue generated by all third party sites such as Google which provide content based on the content of books covered by the agreement.
These issues aside, on the whole I am amazed that again this relatively new company have been able to offer such an incredible gift to the world. With Google Books we have the potential to preserve centuries of human literacy work for generations to come as well as promoting the spread and availability of knowledge amongst all groups and all classes of people.