Randall Stross

Planet Google

Google's search engine is so well known that we now have a verb: to google. But Google's aim of organising the world's information means that it is active in plenty of other areas besides web search. In Planet Google: How One Company is Transforming Our Lives Randall Stross describes some of the projects the company is currently involved in.

To maintain it's position Google needs to be aware of new ways in which people use the internet, and to gain a share of each new market. The book starts with a look at the competition between Google and the social networking site Facebook. We also hear about Google's acquisition of the video upload site YouTube, and it's plan to scan large numbers of the world's books. What I liked about this book was Stross' discussion of the issues involved in such cases. Is it reasonable that Google should disregard the objections of copyright holders? Should we be worried that Google is organising information that we think of as confidential? Stross also discusses the benefits and drawbacks of wholly algorithmic search results rather than those with some human input.

Some books about successful companies such as Google tend to concentrate on the areas in which they are most successful - search in the case of Google - rather than their future plans. I felt that this book gave a more detailed and up to date look at the world in which Google is operating, and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in the current state of the internet.

Amazon.com info

Hardcover 288 pages
ISBN: 141654691X
Salesrank: 541788
Weight:0.9 lbs

Published: 2008 Free Press

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Hardcover 288 pages
ISBN: 1843549808
Salesrank: 400680
Weight:1.15 lbs

Published: 2008 Atlantic Books

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Hardcover 288 pages
ISBN: 141654691X
Salesrank: 174286
Weight:0.9 lbs

Published: Free Press

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Product Description

Based on unprecedented access he received to the highly secretive "Googleplex," acclaimed New York Times columnist Randall Stross takes readers deep inside Google, the most important, most innovative, and most ambitious company of the Internet Age. His revelations demystify the strategy behind the company's recent flurry of bold moves, all driven by the pursuit of a business plan unlike any other: to become the indispensable gatekeeper of all the world's information, the one-stop destination for all our information needs. Will Google succeed? And what are the implications of a single company commanding so much information and knowing so much about us?

As ambitious as Google's goal is, with 68 percent of all Web searches (and growing), profits that are the envy of the business world, and a surplus of talent, the company is, Stross shows, well along the way to fulfilling its ambition, becoming as dominant a force on the Web as Microsoft became on the PC. Google isn't just a superior search service anymore. In recent years it has launched a dizzying array of new services and advanced into whole new businesses, from the introductions of its controversial Book Search and the irresistible Google Earth, to bidding for a slice of the wireless-phone spectrum and nonchalantly purchasing YouTube for $1.65 billion.

Google has also taken direct aim at Microsoft's core business, offering free e-mail and software from word processing to spreadsheets and calendars, pushing a transformative -- and highly disruptive -- concept known as "cloud computing." According to this plan, users will increasingly store all of their data on Google's massive servers -- a network of a million computers that amounts to the world's largest supercomputer, with unlimited capacity to house all the information Google seeks.

The more offerings Google adds, and the more ubiquitous a presence it becomes, the more dependent its users become on its services and the more information they contribute to its uniquely comprehensive collection of data. Will Google stay true to its famous "Don't Be Evil" mantra, using its power in its customers' best interests?

Stross's access to those who have spearheaded so many of Google's new initiatives, his penetrating research into the company's strategy, and his gift for lively storytelling produce an entertaining, deeply informed, and provocative examination of the company's audacious vision for the future and the consequences not only for the business world, but for our culture at large.

Great analytical history of Google so far *****

This is a really informative well written book. The author has an excellent understanding of Internet trends. He gives you many insights new to any layperson. The chapters are well structured and often stand independently. So, if you are interested about a specific topic you can jump ahead. The chapter titled "Unlimited Capacity" is a case in point. I had no idea Google ran such large computer farms in stealthy locations. Those cloud computing farms are populated by thousands of low cost computers that Google manufactures themselves! Who knew Google made their own computers!

At the onset Google founders were hell bent not relying on advertising. They accidentally fell into the key word text driven advertising concept. Google search-text advertising has created and dominated an ad market and generated billions of dollars in revenues for Google. The latter supports all their other products that are unprofitable.

Google has created several products to compete vs others. Most of them have failed. Google noticed that Wikipedia results ranked near the top of Google's search results. But, any search routed to Wikipedia represents lost advertising revenues for Google. So, Google created Knol where everyone can create articles just as in Wikipedia. But, with a Knol the author retains editing control. I have personally written and read articles at both websites. And, Wikipedia is far better and still does far better in search results. Google created Orkut, a social network, to compete with Facebook. And, Orkut has quickly become irrelevant.

Google may have created a game changer with Docs. Google introduced "Documents" a free web based competitor to MicroSoft very expensive PC based Office Suite. It has forced MicroSoft to reduce its prices. I personally use Documents more and more. I now write all my book reviews using Documents that I find more straightforward than Word. I also use its spreadsheet application often. Google may succeed in creating a centrally based alternative to MicroSoft PC centric world where many predecessors such as IBM and Oracle failed.

The chapter on "The Algorithm" confirms Google developed superior computer science behind its web search engine. Yahoo early on outsourced web searches to Google thinking web searches were worthless. The huge volume of web search Yahoo channelled Google's way became a competitive advantage for Google. Its search engine readily handles any scale, unlike its competitors who found the growing web overwhelming. And, the more data the algorithm crunched, the better its search performance. Google then tied the searches to text ads embedded on the side of searches and even figured for customers where to place adds to generate the most revenues for them and for Google. In doing that, Google leapfrogged the competition. And, the cash flow juggernaut (search text adds) was in place.

Google's algorithm approach had erratic results outside searches. The author suggests it has not worked well in news information aggregation (I am surprised, as I feel Google News is one of their most successful applications). On the other hand, the author indicates the same algorithm approach has been unexpectedly effective in language translation. And, Google has reached the top rank in language translation software competition for the toughest languages: Chinese or Arabic. And, it has achieved this feat with no native speakers! Instead, it has simply fed its software algorithm billions of matched documents (one version in English and the other in Chinese or Arabic) and let the software figure out the corresponding linguistic patterns. This has left the competition bedazzled.

The author indicates that several others of Google's ventures ran into difficulty. Google's ambitious goal of digitizing all the books in the World ran into copyright suits. It now lags far behind Amazon that has made many of its books searchable. Also, in video uploading and searches its product was so far behind YouTube that it decided to acquire YouTube for a staggering $1.65 billion. However, Google has not yet figured out how to generate an attractive return on this investment. YouTube videos with often inappropriate content do not cater well to Google search-ad text.

Google made another small acquisition that turned out hugely successful: Keyhole. The latter had developed the software capability to virtually fly and travel all over the world as shown in today's Google Earth. This allowed programmers to develop "mashups" that combine visual geographic information with data regarding restaurants, hotels, relevant ratings, home prices, etc... Successful users of such mashups include Zillow (home prices) and Yelp (consumer ratings of everything).

great story *****

the book tells a great story about scale and prosperity. a good guide for young enterpreneurs

A Good Listen! *****

I just wanted to give this a five star rating. I didn't want to spend 10 mins writing a review, Amazon! - It's a good book if you're interested in the technology wave. It makes some things apparent that Google Tried and failed at.

- I listened to the Audio book from my Library. Go visit and support your local Library. :)

Solid overview of Google, more on the biz/growth side, but a bit dated ***

This book is definitely non-technical about Google's technical side. And, it's not hugely in-depth on its business development side. It's got enough depth, though, that you can tell the "Do No Evil," for example, while it has a fair amount of traction, was never a 100 percent slogan.

Within its dateline, the book glosses over any divisions between Brin/Page and Schmidt. It also almost totally ignores the relations of all three with Apple's Steve Jobs. Google's definite "quasi-evil" in "engaging" with China gets ignored.

Finally, it's dated. The lawsuit over Google's book scanning drags on 2 years later. Google claims it could leave China, but probably will cave.

Healthy historical review of the rise of Google and its role in the world ***

A well researched, balanced look at the rise of Google and the impact they've had on business and the world. The author was obviously granted special access to peek under the covers of Google and did a good job of calling out inconsistencies when he saw them. It's amazing to see how Google has steadily grown its breadth of information gathering services, and a little scary. The accumulation of so much personal information by one entity has never before been so easily accepted as it has been with this company, probably because we're kind of like the frog in the pot of warming water. I certainly have an increased appreciation for Google's place in the online services space and a better understanding of its rapid growth over the past 10 years.

Journalism on the wing. Grab it before it goes stale ***

This is a piece of ephemera between hard covers. It is a generally satisfactory--although distinctly lightweight--overview of the first decade of Google, written by an industrious gleaner who has plainly put effort into seeking out and assimilating published sources but has had little luck in digging out inside details (not to mention dirt.)

This is a book for outsiders written by an outsider. It offers considerable virtues but they are all obviously time-dated. In a year or two, this will be stale history of a company that will have become something rather different from the Google in the book. In a decade, "Planet Google" will become a mere curiosity, like that one-time bestseller, "The Soul of a New Machine." In a century, perhaps, it will be the basis of a preface to a truly meaningful history of Google or of its successor(s).

If you are interested, grab "Planet Google" quickly, while it's still hot.

Competent but Lacking the Insider View ****

Randall Stross's earlier eBoys (a profile of Benchmark, the Silicon Valley venture firm) is a hard act to follow and, to be frank, Planet Google falls short in a number of areas. Whereas the Benchmark Partners gave Stross frequent and unrestricted access to meetings with both prospective and actual investments and, most revealingly, internal partnership meetings, it's clear that he simply didn't get the same intimate contact with Brin, Page or Schmidt at Google. That said, Stross is a shrewd observer of business and manages to extract some worthwhile insights into how the Google business model has evolved and where it's going in the future. A solid, workmanlike book of 200 pages (with 60 pages of somewhat spurious notes!)

Informative, insightful, and candidly written ****

In the book which addresses the general reader, the two capacities of the author namely the New York Time columnist and the professor of business history meld seamlessly. The book is an entertaining and easy read and often conveys an air of suspense, traits which point to the columnist. But behind the entertaining facade there looms the professor of business history with his sense of the significant in tracing the evolution of this phenomenally successful company, in analysing the unique elements that contributed to its success but also pointing to the difficulties and the occasional blunder in its path and in describing the proliferation of its activities from the initial single activity of web search to its present culmination of 'cloud computing'.

And from the flavour to the substance of the book.

The profound vision and awe inspiring ambition of the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, articulated few months after the establishment of Google in 1998 was to 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful'.

The first and still by far the most successful activity of the company was web search. The key to the success was hardware and software technology that was designed to scale up fast and inexpensively. It was able to acquire market capitilization that exceeded all other Internet companies because it chanced upon text ads linked to the keywords of a search phrase, ads that turned out to be highly efficient means for advertisers to reach prospective buyers.

To the present day ninety-nine percent of its revenues is still generated by these simple text ads which in 2007 amounted to $16.5 billion. In May 2008, Google fielded 68.3 percent of all U.S Internet searches compared to Yahoo's 20 percent and Microsoft's MSN 5.9 percent.

In ten short years after its establishment Google moved boldly to add to its collection of web pages, indexes of published items in a variety of formats including news, books, scholary journals, street maps, satellite images, corporate financial information and video, the Google YouTube which it acquired at $1.65 billion.

More recently it has created the infrastructure to perform more tasks than search, such as creating documents like those that Microsoft Office's Word, Excel and Power Point applications produce. Google also has begun to offer 'software as service' using its own software and storing and processing users' data on remote servers run by its company. The computer industry has adopted a new phrase, 'cloud computing', for this model of highly centralized computing. A user's document will seem to float in cyberspace, accessible from anywhere with an Internet Connection.

The preceding model of centralised computing creates enormous posibilities but to some looks ominous as potentially infringing privacy.

Good Survey But Lacks Depth ***

The premise of chronicling the rise of Google is a fascinating one. The corporation that is the information age's equivalence of the East India Company is one that is intriguing and frightening at the same time. Randall Stross, technology writer for the New York Times attempts to do just that in "Planet Google."

While I like the premise of the book, I have to say that the research lacks depth and ideological insight. That is to say, Stross tells us the how and what, but he is light on the why. While there are extensive endnotes, I was surprised by the lack of archival information from Google itself, considering Stross had such in depth internal access to Google's executives and day-to-day operations.

Overall, if one is relatively unfamiliar with the what and how of Google, this would be a good read into the general story of one of the most important companies of our time. For a deeper look at the societal implications of Google's omniscience, keep looking.