Definitive account of the Google revolution

BOOK OF THE DAY: Googled: The End Of The World As We Know ItBy Ken Auletta, Virgin Books, 400pp, £12.99

IS THIS the hippy dream of the 1960s realised? Google, the giant computing and internet search corporation, which provides most of its products for free, has a mission statement: “Do No Evil.”

Set up by two computing academics in 1988 so they “could make the world a better place”, the company is regularly voted one of the best organisations to work for and has a multi-billion dollar yearly turnaround which it ploughs back into exciting new developments for net surfers. With well over one billion searches a day, it is an indispensable necessity of modern life.

Beneath the surface, though, everything is not as "happy clappy" as it may seem. American journalist Ken Auletta has written this nigh definitive account of the company, and it succeeds in not only uncovering some tantalising stories on Google's modi operandibut also in laying bare tensions between the company's sometime philanthropic nature and how it conducts its business affairs.

The key here is the company’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who dreamt up Google while doing PhDs at Stanford University in the 1990s. They came up with “PageRank”, which revolutionised how we searched for information on the web. It was doubly fortuitous that Page and Brin arrived on the scene just when the personal computer was becoming ubiquitous, and so much unsorted information was being thrown on the web.

Page and Brin are skilfully portrayed here as awesomely talented men who see the full internet picture and get exasperated when their “vision” is held back by such fiddly concepts as “intellectual property”. This is best illustrated by how Google went about digitising books. There were massive technical problems to be overcome in scanning and indexing millions of books so they could be displayed online, but the company managed to come up with a top secret machine that could accomplish this gargantuan task and would have far-reaching implications for publishing.

For Google, the book project has manifold educational consequences and could ensure the future of publishing by making books easier to access and read – but for the authors, this was copyright infringement. And this says it all about the company: Auletta writes about how Brin once said that if they had to ask all publishers and authors for permission, then “we might not have done the project”. For Page and Brin, technological advancement, which they feel helps society in so many ways, should take precedence over complicated copyright issues.

There was a similar approach to Google’s controversial move into China. To have a presence there, Google had to accept a certain amount of censoring by the Chinese government. That they acquiesced to this was widely viewed as a sell-out. On March 22nd last, however, Google moved its China internet search service offshore to Hong Kong in order to provide uncensored results.

Auletta balances everything out here – praising and criticising as necessary. He shows how a company whose aim is “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” is highly secretive about anything to do with its own technology.

What you get here is an extremely well-researched look at one of the most interesting and influential companies of our time. With Google steaming ahead on all sort of excitingly innovative developments, this is all the catch-up information you need.

Brian Boyd is an Irish Times columnist