The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time
Language: English
Pages: 0
ISBN: B000CCE4IU
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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 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. Listeners 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; and 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.
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the manuscript, and offering excellent suggestions along the way; and for striving for excellence in everything you do and encouraging me to do the same. Your sacrifices, generous spirit, and love enabled me to throw myself fully into the reporting and writing of this book. I could not have done it without you, and I love you very much. Special thanks to my remarkable parents, Doris and Harry Vise, for their wise counsel and love in connection with this book and so much else since the day I was
of improving Web research. Brin was drawn to the project by the chance to work with Page and by his own interest in extracting information from giant amounts of random data. What could be bigger or better than the entire World Wide Web for Brin to attack with his math and programming skills? Page had a theory. Counting the number of links pointing to a Web site was a way of ranking that site’s popularity. While popularity and quality don’t go hand in hand, he and Brin both had grown up in homes
“BackRub” because it dealt with the incoming—or “back”— links to Web pages. Ever thrifty, Page put his left hand on a scanner, converted the image to black and white, and the new BackRub site had its logo. Page, Brin, and Motwani all contributed ideas to the evolving project. Motwani said that it would soon become clear that what they had created together was more than just a way to further their academic research. Without intending to, the trio had devised a ranking system for the Internet, and
on the Web to help bring to life the marketing examples he uses in class. “Any given lecture, I probably have six or seven bits in there that came from Google Image Search,” Fader says. By speeding up the tracking of research citations, Google also comes in handy during decisions about whether to hire or award tenure to faculty members. Especially for new research, Fader says, “you get a much earlier read on its overall impact and ability to hop across academic disciplines through Google.” In
that money can buy.’ Sergey was adamant about the food service and keeping employees on campus, and keeping productivity up, and encouraging them to come in every day not knowing what they were going to be served. I wouldn’t put out the menu until ten minutes before lunch. They wanted burgers, hot dogs, burritos. They were kids. I said, ‘I was hired to do something else: really healthy, eclectic foods that were organic.’ I sold them on the organic thing. The first time I met them, Sergey talked