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The Google Story
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The Google Story

David A. Vise and Mark Malseed
Delacorte Press, 2005
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Editorial Rating

8

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  • Engaging

Recommendation

You probably use Google when you are looking for something on the Web. But do you know who founded the company and why it is unique? Here’s the inside scoop. Authors David Vise and Mark Malseed tell the story of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in fast-moving, energetic prose, from start-up to triumph. The authors spend little time considering any of the possible negative aspects associated with Google, but most readers will find that it hardly matters because their book is downright fun, and it ends with a useful set of Google search tips. getAbstract says you will learn so much about the founders, the company’s management and its wonderfully exotic culture that you will not notice the absence of critical distance.

Summary

A Bargain Offer

If Stanford University had offered to sell you Google’s search technology for a million bucks a few years ago, would you have found a way to buy it? Yahoo, Alta Vista and various companies all passed. The dearth of buyers created a dilemma for Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the two Stanford University doctorate students who created Google. They both came from academic families and were set on technology careers. However, the lack of outside interest in their search engine ("Search doesn't matter," they were told) made them realize that to capture the value of their creation, they had to leave their Ph.D. programs and build the business. They named it by misspelling the mammoth number googol (1 with 100 zeroes), representing the almost endless universe of pages Google’s engine makes available for search, for free, to anyone with access to a Web browser. From the outset, a feature called “PageRank” made Google’s results unique. Google searches billions of pages and then, thanks to PageRank, lists the results in their likely order of interest to the searcher. And it does that job better than any other search engine.

Google’s power comes from the way it merges...

About the Authors

David A. Vise won a Pulitzer Prize at the Washington Post and works for a hedge fund. This is his fourth book. A Wharton M.B.A. named to the school's list of most influential alumni, he began his career at a major brokerage house. He wrote for a financial analysis Web site and the Wall Street Journal. Mark Malseed is a former senior researcher for Bob Woodward on two major books about the Bush administration. He has contributed to several publications, including the Washington Post and the Boston Herald.

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