Is Google, the owner of the world’s favorite search engine, a force for good or for ill? Is it a friend to the fourth estate, on which democracy depends, or an enemy?
The answer found in this journey through Google’s history of breakthroughs, boundless ambitions and free massages on its campus in Mountain View, Calif., can be summed up in a word coined by advertising executive Martin Sorrell: Google is a “frenemy” — neither a friend nor an enemy “but a rival power to guard against,” as author Ken Auletta puts it.
Auletta, who writes for the New Yorker, says he spent 2½ years reporting this, his 11th book. Granted extensive access to the company’s founders and executives, he emerged with an account that neither idolizes nor demonizes the cash machine it has become. Much of the material in “Googled” will be familiar to investors who’ve tracked the company’s ascent. For those less familiar with the story, Auletta traces the full arc — from the days when Sergey Brin and Larry Page hogged Stanford University’s computer system while creating the engine they originally called BackRub to Google’s initial public offering in 2004, which produced more than 900 Google millionaires, including the company’s first masseuse, he writes. James Pressley, Bloomberg News
