Searching for answers about why Google tries to control the net

BOOK REVIEW: Planet Google: How one Company is Transforming our Livesby Randall Stross Atlantic Books: £16.99 (€18)

THE SUBTITLE of this book's American edition is far more revealing: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything we Know. For this is really a book about the audacity of search.

Google, one of the most phenomenal companies to emerge in the past decade (or any decade, for that matter), represents both what is most exciting and most worrying about the internet.

On one hand, Google’s search engine is easily the single most indispensable web tool, its famous search algorithm giving shape to the sprawling virtual real estate of the internet’s vast agglomeration of web pages. Google has become the verb we live our web-searching lives by.

Yet the company’s determination to know the web in detail – and more critically, the behaviour of its users – has from the very start, raised privacy concerns that continue to dog it.

That duality guarantees a company that is sure to fascinate. Planet Google, despite an extended title that makes it sound more like an authorised promotional volume ("How One Company is Transforming Our Lives"), is a welcome, entertaining – and quite frankly, often frightening – close look at a company that grew from 1,628 employees in 2003 to 16,805 only four years later.

As author Randall Stross makes clear, Google from its start as a Stanford University dormitory room-based project had one singular, driving vision – to catalogue the internet down to its minutiae and to be able to scale indefinitely to continue to do so.

The ability to make money – as it turns out, lots and lots and lots of money – by matching searches to advertising, was truly a felicitous afterthought to the big plan of knowing the internet with a kind of cold, calculating intimacy.

But that now important revenue drive, based on knowing users and watching their activities, coupled with that desire to stare into the deep heart of every aspect of the internet – and reveal and catalogue it – has made for discomforting expansion (scanning users’ e-mail; maps that capture photographs of unsuspecting people at street level; the purchase of online ad firm DoubleClick, giving it unprecedented market dominance in advertising; the willingness to accommodate an oppressive regime in China to gain market access to billions more future internet users, and on and on).

Stross is both enthusiastic about and critical of his subject, a fine balance that keeps the book from becoming either a corporate hagiography or a privacy advocacy screed.

A professor of business at San José State University known to many for his Digital Domain column in the New York Timesand previous books on Valley industries, Stross also was given some insider access to Google for the volume, although "insider" in Google terms is about as minimalist as the famously sparse design of the search engine's homepage.

So in the end, Stross’s interviews with some Google folks and (more interestingly) his chance to sit in on one of the regular company meetings where company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page take questions from their employees, are far less revealing than the knowing and analytical eye he casts on the company.

In particular, chapters that delve into the background of the companies Google has bought and incorporated into the Google empire (such as YouTube and Keyhole, the firm that became Google Earth) and his analysis of the reason why Google does what Google does, bring real illumination.

This is because what most makes Google Google, and what baffles most onlookers, is the company’s motivations for providing free services like Earth, buying up a roster of office productivity applications and offering them for free, or going into its massively costly, copyright-fraught book-scanning endeavour.

Why? Because each of these endeavours creates huge testbeds of willing users that enable Google to refine its search and analysis algorithms (and understand us better, too); creates vast new sources of web-based data to feed its search maw, which demands the raw data in order to improve and improve again and allows the cash-rich company, full of very smart people, to figure out how to be best positioned for where the web goes next.

Stross argues that so focused are the company’s founders and its employees on the search mantra of knowing all the web and serving it up in the most efficiently and precise way possible to its user, that it regularly overlooks privacy issues and fails to understand that simply because something is cool does not mean that people are willing to sacrifice privacy for it.

A major challenge for the company is that it is increasingly being perceived not as a whimsical, friendly and cool company, but a monolith of the internet that controls the presentation of the web’s richness. As the net’s ubiquitous gatekeeper, Google perhaps knows us all too intimately, too.

As a consequence, we all need to know Google better than we do, as this single company achieves unprecedented ability to control and manage the data we want to access and control and manage data about all of us.