Book Review: Auletta tells Google story

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“Googled: The End of the World as We Know It” (The Penguin Press, 336 pages, $25.95), by Ken Auletta

Google was just a nifty search engine without an obvious way to make money before it began brilliantly exploiting the sale of targeted advertising. Google makes its billions from text ads placed next to Google searches and by matching advertisers with Web pages. It has used that revenue to reach into news aggregation, smart phone software and book digitizing.

At heart, this is a story about Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University who designed a search engine that ranked results by the number of links so it would return more relevant results. Auletta paints a nuanced dual portrait of Brin and Page, who come off with a mix of nerdiness, idealism and – befitting two young men who have been so spectacularly right – a bit of arrogance.

Brin is the edgier one. He arrives at a meeting with a media titan late and wearing rollerblades; he tests a top legal job candidate by asking her to draft a contract to sell his soul to the devil. Both Brin and Page can seem loopy, but Auletta portrays them as visionaries monomaniacally focused on drafting top engineering talent, treating them well and making sure they create the best product possible.

Auletta wrote a story that, unavoidably, lacks a final chapter. It’s still too early to tell if Google will grow into the $100 billion media company chief executive Eric Schmidt dreams of or follow the path of other “invulnerable” businesses before it like IBM, AT&T or AOL.

– The Associated Press

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