Book Review: Planet Google by Randall Stross

I have always admired Google, as a company. The growth of the company is staggering and that is not a surprise. Their business model is completely different. Unlike Microsoft, they will give you everything for free, but they will continue innovating. Surprisingly this business model is working perfectly for them. Microsoft has been trying to catch up with the Google search, but they are not even close. Their new search engine, sorry decision engine, Bing sux big time. A friend of mine had this status message few days ago, "Bing - But It's Not Google". So true. One important lesson that we need to take from companies like Yahoo is that, in Silicon valley, if you dont innovate and change according to the market, you will vanish. It seems like google has learnt that lesson. They have effectively moved onto the mobile market now, while constantly changing and innovating their existing services. I always read something new in Gmail labs or addition of new features in Google docs or introduction of completely new products. Quite often i get new and cool mobile apps from google as well, for my G1.

The above book by Randall stross is good. It gives a first hand report of how google emerged from a small dorm room to a world dominating company. The narrative style is very good. And this is not another book about statistics. the thing i like about the book is, the author has given a detailed analysis and its implications. So it doesnt feel like reading a history book. It seems like the author was present in every meeting that google ever conducted. It gives first hand report of why and how Google created an empire around its search business. It feels more like a novel. A rags-to-riches-story, that we all love.


Reading the book, i learnt how the google founders made use of every oppurtunity they got. Main reason for the success of google is, they were right-place-at-right-time. After the dot comm bubble, they literally paid pennies to buy huge data centres. When every other competitor of Google had invested millions and millions on Super computers to do the search, google on the other hand used the power of thousands of personal desktop computers. This, according to the author was a bold move by the Google founders which paid huge rewards later, both with respect to cost and technology.


The author recalls one incident during the intial days of Google. This happened many years ago. Marissa Mayer was a new employee (She was employee number 20 in Google, by then a unknown startup). When the company was still in very beginning stage, they didnt have enough programmers or computers. They struck a deal with Netscape, which agreed to divert every one of the five search requests it got from its user, which was so minimal in number compared to the number google is handling right now. But what happened was, the google servers couldnt manage the load and they went up in flames. Sergey brin and Larry page were devasted. After few mins, noone could find the founders. Marissa Mayer went searching for the founders and she found one of the founder in the nearby coffee shop, sitting in a corner. She asked him, why he was sitting there alone. And he said, "I am hiding". Marissa Mayer recently recalled in an interview, that she said to herself that the company would go bust in 2 months. But who knew then, that Google will become a multi-billion dollar empire.

If there is something that i learnt about Google from this book, it is their planning and dedication to quality and innovation. I shall give a small example. Google is offering a free service called, Goog-411. This service apparantly involves so much money and time. But Google did provide this service for free. When it was released 2 years ago, there were few critics who said, this is waste of time. But do you know why Google released this free service? It is to collect voice samples from people. During the last few years, the number of people in the US, who used this service increased in exponential terms. They collected so many millions voice samples, which was fed into an algorithm which used these voice samples to perfectly convert people's voice into text. This algorithm that google has is ten times effective as any other voice recognition system. Do you know what google is planning to do with these voice samples? To index audio content and Google Voice, which is their new service for mobile phones. Read up on Google voice. It is just stunning. Critics say, Google voice will completely change the way we use telephones and mobile phones.

But there could be potential problems with one company controlling all the information in the world. Google's motto is "Dont be evil". But for how long can they be not-evil? Recently in China, Google had two options.
1. To allow any search request irrespective of pro-communist party or anti-communist party. As a result they will be banned by the Chinese government and loose revenue.
2. They had another option to accept the terms of the chinese government and block loads of anti-communist party webpages. By this they can earn loads of money.
If Google should stick by its motto, they should have taken option number 1. But they didnt. Things like this make people wonder what Google is becoming.


Currently, they know all my mails. With the Google search, they know what i am interested in. With my android phone, all my contacts and their phone numbers are all saved in google servers. All my SMSes are stored in Google servers. With google voice, they can also know who i talk to and what i talk about. They know which stocks i am interested in thru Google Finance. they know my family and friends thru picasa and orkut. they know what i am doing today or two weeks down the line thru Google calendar. They know my current location using Google latitude. They also know what videos and news content i like. So literally Google knows everything about me. This is a serious privacy concern.


I recall an interview i read recently, where the VP for search in Google said, they have only indexed 5% of the world's information. Their ultimate aim is to make Google so ubiquitous that you can go to google.com and type, "What shirt should i wear today?" or "Which job should i take?" and Google will give you an answer. Google has created a brand value which is based completely on trust. So I sincerely trust Google and same goes for so many million people who use Google services everyday. Lets all hope, Google sticks by its motto, "Dont be evil".