Written when Google had just gone public and still boasted about «not being evil», this book by David Vise — a Pulitzer-winning Washington Post journalist — remains the best chronicle of the rise of the company that reorganized the world's information.
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Pulitzer-winning journalist David Vise narrates Google's birth and explosion: two Stanford PhD students who turned a page-ranking algorithm into the company that redefined the Internet, advertising, and access to knowledge — from PageRank to the unorthodox 2004 IPO and the engineering culture behind it all.
Written when Google had just gone public and still boasted about «not being evil», this book by David Vise — a Pulitzer-winning Washington Post journalist — remains the best chronicle of the rise of the company that reorganized the world's information. Vise reconstructs the improbable chemistry between Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford, PageRank's creation as an academic project, Susan Wojcicki's garage, the discipline of founders who refused to sell for a million dollars when they had no revenue, and the discovery — copied from and perfected over Overture — of the auction-based advertising model that turned search into the most efficient profit machine ever created. The book also captures the founding cultural decisions: PhD-only hiring, 20% time, the Dutch-auction IPO against Wall Street's advice. It lacks, by date, everything that came later — YouTube, Android, programmatic advertising, privacy and monopoly dilemmas — but as a document of the origin and the business model it remains unmatched.
For anyone wanting to understand the origin and business model of the Internet's most influential company; it does not cover the post-2005 era.
FactDavid A. Vise won a Pulitzer Prize as a Washington Post journalist; «The Google Story» was published in 2005, one year after the company's IPO.
