Googled
The End of the World as We Know It
by Ken Auletta
Penguin, 400 pp., $27.95
Ken Auletta's Googled is the sixth corporate biography of Google published in the last four years. Auletta's book is more current than the others, and he had better access to the principals. The company's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and their partner Eric Schmidt spend much time talking on the record, as do many other Silicon Valley silverbacks. But Auletta's conclusions largely resemble those of the other entrants in the genre: Page and Brin are brilliant; the world has never seen a company like Google; Google is all-powerful and fated to rule the cosmos. It's not clear that any of this received wisdom is quite right.
It is clear that Google's rise is remarkable, and an interesting story. As graduate students at Stanford, Page and Brin became interested in creating a search engine that could scale upwards along with the growth of the world wide web. This meant abandoning human editors--which is how the early web searches were compiled--and replacing them with automation. They devised a system in which automated spider programs would copy pages from the Internet, which would then be indexed. Results are determined by a ranking system based on a complex algorithm.
Page and Brin left Stanford in 1998 and incorporated their search engine into a company called Google. ("BackRub," "Googol," and "The Whatbox" were the other names under consideration; the last would have been the most descriptive.) From the start, people were excited about the
business. They had $1 million in seed money from four investors at the outset and were given another $25 million in venture capital less than a year later. This despite the fact that neither Brin nor Page had any idea how they might eventually make money with their product.
After three years of losing money, Google came up with the idea to sell little text ads on its search-results page. The ads a user was shown depended on what they had searched for, making them particularly attractive to advertisers. Adding to the enticement was that Google only charged advertisers if a user clicked on their ad. It was a revolutionary idea which turned into gushers of money for Google. The year before they began serving up these ads the company had revenues of $86 million. The next year (2002) revenues jumped to $400 million. The year after that they stood at $1.5 billion, and they've continued to increase at a phenomenal pace ever since.
Google's wealth is difficult to comprehend. On the day that the company went public 900 employees became millionaires. Four employees and three outside directors became billionaires. Even the in-house masseuse became so wealthy that she retired and established a private philanthropic foundation. And in the intervening years, Google has used its wealth to spread outwards from the search business into a formidable number of other businesses: web video, TV advertising, e-commerce, cloud-computing, and mobile phones, to name just a few.
In Googled Auletta ascribes the company's success to Page and Brin's genius and the uniqueness of the corporate culture they've built. Google centers itself around rank-and-file engineers, not managers or sales staffs. Neither of the founders employs a secretary. The company is famously generous with employees, providing free massages and meals and giving them 20 percent of their work time to pursue individual projects of their choosing. And the founders have made plain that they view Google's mission as not to make money but to improve the world.
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