Know-it-all
Behind Google's goal of assembling the sum total of the world's information
Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know
By Randall Stross
Free Press, 275 pp., $26
Historically, we Americans have always been audacious enough to ask: What's the big idea? We like to think big. The Founding Fathers had the high-minded foresight to envision liberty and justice for all. Our engineers reduced the time required for cross-country travel from weeks to days to hours, and then they put ordinary citizens into outer space.
Now, in the Internet age, one unusual company has assumed a mission that threatens to dwarf all others in human history. Its goal is as big as it gets: to assemble all of our information, everywhere.
In its 10 short years of existence, the search engine Google has become omnipresent in the lives of computer users. The whimsical company name is now shorthand for our relentless quest for answers. Whether we're looking for information on the Great Chicago Fire, news of a flare-up on the campaign trail, or the whereabouts of an old flame, we Google.
Given the virtual nature of the medium that is the company's bread and butter, it almost comes as a surprise to consider its physical headquarters - a "Googleplex" of two- and three-story buildings in Mountain View, Calif. The shared open campus features picnic tables shaded by umbrellas in the company colors, a circular volleyball court, a bronze T. rex skeleton called Stan, and, according to author Randall Stross, a "grassy knoll."
No doubt the author, not otherwise prone to levity, couldn't resist typing that last phrase. As it endeavors nothing less than to organize all of the world's intelligence, Google faces a fast-mounting barrage of conspiracy theories. Indexing the contents of every available website was just a start. Who, critics ask, will have access to the vast archives of e-mail messages the company is amassing through its Web mail service? How does the stated aim of Google Earth - to visually document every place on the planet - interfere with our right to privacy?
Thus far, the company has answered every charge with corporate innocence. When the author attends one of Google's customary Friday meetings, in which employees are free to question any development, one staffer complains about the legal department's requirement that sales e-mails include "a long disclaimer in legalese, a very 'unGoogley practice.' "
Co-founder Larry Page addresses the issue on the spot. "Who's responsible for that?" he asks. Seeing a hand go up, he says, "All right. Don't do it," to widespread laughter.
Launched in 1998 by Page and Russian émigré Sergey Brin, fellow Stanford PhD candidates, with a mysterious algorithm and a few racks of PC parts, Google still runs on youthful pluck. Employees love a good prank, and the company motto sounds like something to be uttered only when wearing a Halloween mask: "Don't Be Evil."
As Stross, a New York Times tech columnist, notes repeatedly, Google's modus operandi has always been to create new ways to catalog information - books, video, maps, languages - and figure out how to "monetize" those innovations later. The company tells a story about itself that emphasizes the enormous benefits for mankind, and all but disregards its own profitability. As a result, the fact that it is fundamentally in the business of advertising goes largely unnoticed.
In the beginning, the ads themselves went all but unnoticed. Page and Brin calculated that modest, classified-style ads designed to appear only with well-matched search phrases would pay off handsomely when "scaled" to the infinite possibilities of the global marketplace and the Web.
That success, and the corollary perception that Google was not selling products but providing a valuable service, have bolstered the firm's ambitions. Mainly forgoing the contextualization that marked John Battelle's 2006 book "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture," Stross focuses squarely on his subject, documenting the company's expansion with the development of Google Earth, its acquisition of YouTube, and its beloved "moon shot" - the proposed digitization of every book in existence.
To some extent, this book feels like a work in progress, like a premature biography of a pop star still in her 20s. But when the pop star insinuates herself into the lives of people in the remotest parts of the globe, her impact and importance have undoubtedly scaled.
The biggest star to date in the world of computing may be HAL 9000, the deceptively mild-mannered A.I. in Stanley Kubrick's screen version of "2001: A Space Odyssey." With his ability to compare all manner of input, HAL, as Brin once told an interviewer, was a role model for Google. "Hopefully," Brin was quick to add, a mature Google "would never have a bug like HAL did where he killed the occupants of the spaceship."
Yes, hopefully. Yet Google's stratospheric plans can't help but make us wonder. Its venture into the ethereal concept of "cloud computing," in which the company will offer users software access from its servers, eliminating the need for personal computers loaded with programs and documents, could prove as revolutionary as centralized electrical power, the author suggests. And the advent of electricity, he reminds us, brought with it hundreds of accidental electrocutions.
If the prospects can seem ominous, they are also thrilling. On the day this review was being written, a Google staffer posted an update on the company's blog about the push to digitize all of the world's newspaper archives. "Billions of news pages," he promised, "containing every story ever written."
Easy, tiger. We're just trying to get through the Sunday paper.
James Sullivan is the author of the forthcoming "The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America." 