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In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives Paperback – February 2, 2021

by Steven Levy (Author)

838 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

See all formats and editions

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“The most interesting book ever written about Google” (The Washington Post) delivers the inside story behind the most successful and admired technology company of our time, now updated with a new Afterword.

Google is arguably the most important company in the world today, with such pervasive influence that its name is a verb. The company founded by two Stanford graduate students—Larry Page and Sergey Brin—has become a tech giant known the world over. Since starting with its search engine, Google has moved into mobile phones, computer operating systems, power utilities, self-driving cars, all while remaining the most powerful company in the advertising business.

Granted unprecedented access to the company, Levy disclosed that the key to Google’s success in all these businesses lay in its engineering mindset and adoption of certain internet values such as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk-taking. Levy discloses details behind Google’s relationship with China, including how Brin disagreed with his colleagues on the China strategy—and why its social networking initiative failed; the first time Google tried chasing a successful competitor. He examines Google’s rocky relationship with government regulators, particularly in the EU, and how it has responded when employees left the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups.

In the Plex is the “most authoritative…and in many ways the most entertaining” (James Gleick, The New York Book Review) account of Google to date and offers “an instructive primer on how the minds behind the world’s most influential internet company function” (Richard Waters, The Wall Street Journal).

Editorial Reviews

Review

[Steven Levy] spent much of the past three years playing anthropologist at one of the Internet's most interesting villages and set of inhabitants -- the Googleplex and the tribue of Googlers who inhabit it. . . . A deep dive into Google's culture, history and technology.
--Mike Swift, San Jose Mercury News

Almost nothing can stop a remarkable idea executed well at the right time, as Steven Levy's brisk-but-detailed history of Google, In the Plex, convincingly proves. . . . makes obsolete previous books on the company.
--Jack Shafer, The San Francisco Chronicle

An instructive primer on how the minds behind the world's most influential internet company function.
--Richard Waters, The Wall Street Journal

Dense, driven examination of the pioneering search engine that changed the face of the Internet.

Thoroughly versed in technology reporting, Wired senior writer Levy deliberates at great length about online behemoth Google and creatively documents the company's genesis from a 'feisty start-up to a market-dominating giant.' The author capably describes Google's founders, Stanford grads Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as sharp, user-focused and steadfastly intent on 'organizing all the world's information.' Levy traces how Google's intricately developed, intrepid beginnings and gradual ascent over a competitive marketplace birthed an advertising-fueled 'money machine' (especially following its IPO in 2004), and he follows the expansion and operation of the company's liberal work campus ('Googleplex') and its distinctively selective hiring process (Page still signs off on every new hire). The author was afforded an opportunity to observe the company's operations, development, culture and advertising model from within the infrastructure for two years with full managerial cooperation. From there, he performed hundreds of interviews with past and current employees and discovered the type of 'creative disorganization' that can either make or break a business. Though clearly in awe of Google's crowning significance, Levy evenhandedly notes the company's more glaring deficiencies, like the 2004 cyber-attack that forced the removal of the search engine from mainland China, a decision vehemently unsupported by co-founder Brin. Though the author offers plenty of well-known information, it's his catbird-seat vantage point that really gets to the good stuff.

Outstanding reportage delivered in the upbeat, informative fashion for which Levy is well known.

--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Levy is America's premier technology journalist. . . . He has produced the most interesting book ever written about Google. He makes the biggest intellectual challenges of computer science seem endlessly fun and fascinating. . . . We can expect many more books about Google. But few will deliver the lively, idea-based journalism of In the Plex."
--Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Washington Post

Steven Levy's new account [of Google], In the Plex, is the most authoritative to date and in many ways the most entertaining.
--James Gleick, The New York Review of Books

The most comprehensive, intelligent and readable analysis of Google to date. Levy is particularly good on how those behind Google think and work. . . . What's more, his lucid introductions to Google's core technologies - the search engine and the company's data centres - are written in non-geek English and are rich with anecdotes and analysis. . . . In The Plex teems with original insight into Google's most controversial affairs.
--Andrew Keen, New Scientist

The rise of Google is an engrossing story, and nobody's ever related it in such depth.
--Hiawatha Bray, The Boston Globe

The wizards of Silicon Valley often hype their hardware/software breakthroughs as 'magical' for the products' ability to pull off dazzling stunts in the blink of an eye. And true to the magicians' code, these tech talents rarely let mere mortals peer behind the curtains. . . . That's what makes Levy's just-out tome so valuable.
--Jonathan Takiff, The Philadelphia Daily News

About the Author

Steven Levy is editor at large at Wired magazine. The Washington Post has called him “America’s premier technology journalist.” His was previously founder of Backchannel and chief technology writer and senior editor for Newsweek. Levy has written seven previous books and his work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper’s Magazine, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Premiere. Levy has also won several awards during his thirty-plus years of writing about technology and is the author of several previous books including Facebook: The Inside Story; Insanely Great; The Perfect Thing; and In the Plex. He lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue: Searching for Google PROLOGUE SEARCHING FOR GOOGLE
“Have you heard of Google?”

It was a blazing hot July day in 2007, in the rural Indian village of Ragihalli, located thirty miles outside Bangalore. Twenty-two people from a company based in Mountain View, California, had driven in SUVs and vans up an unpaved road to this enclave of seventy threadbare huts with cement floors, surrounded by fields occasionally trampled by unwelcome elephants. Though electricity had come to Ragihalli some years earlier, there was not a single personal computer in the community. The visit had begun awkwardly, as the outsiders piled out of the cars and faced the entire population of the village, about two hundred people, who had turned out to welcome them. It was as if these well-dressed Westerners had dropped in from another planet, which in a sense they had. Young schoolchildren were pushed forward, and they performed a song. The visitors, in turn, gave the children notebooks and candy. There was an uncomfortable silence, broken when Marissa Mayer, the delegation’s leader, a woman of thirty-two, said, “Let’s interact with them.” The group fanned out and began to engage the villagers in awkward conversation.

That is how Alex Vogenthaler came to ask a spindly young man with a wide smile whether he had heard of Google, Vogenthaler’s employer. It was a question that he would never have had to ask in his home country: virtually everyone in the United States and everywhere in the wired-up world knew Google. Its uncannily effective Internet search product had changed the way people accessed information, changed the way they thought about information. Its 2004 IPO had established it as an economic giant. And its founders themselves were the perfect examples of the superbrainy engineering mentality that represented the future of business in the Internet age.

The villager admitted that, no, he had never heard of this Google. “What is it?” he asked. Vogenthaler tried to explain in the simplest terms that Google was a company that operated on the Internet. People used it to search for information. You would ask it a question, and it would immediately give you the answer from huge repositories of information it had gathered on the World Wide Web.

The man listened patiently but clearly was more familiar with rice fields than search fields.

Then the villager held up a cell phone. “Is this you what mean?” he seemed to ask.

The little connectivity meter on the phone display had four bars. There are significant swaths of the United States of America where one can barely pull in a signal—or gets no bars at all. But here in rural India, the signal was strong.

Google, it turns out, was on the verge of a multimillion-dollar mobile effort to make smart phones into information prostheses, adjuncts to the human brain that would allow people to get information to a vast swath of all the world’s knowledge instantly. This man might not know Google yet, but the company would soon be in Ragihalli. And then he would know Google.

I witnessed this exchange in 2007 as an observer on the annual trip of Google associate product managers, a select group pegged as the company’s future leaders. We began our journey in San Francisco and touched down in Tokyo, Beijing, Bangalore, and Tel Aviv before returning home sixteen days later.

My participation on the trip had been a consequence of a long relationship with Google. In late 1998, I’d heard buzz about a smarter search engine and tried it out. Google was miles better than anything I’d used before. When I heard a bit about the site’s method of extracting such good results—it relied on sort of a web-based democracy—I became even more intrigued. This is how I put it in the February 22, 1999, issue of Newsweek: “Google, the Net’s hottest search engine, draws on feedback from the web itself to deliver more relevant results to customer queries.”

Later that year, I arranged with Google’s newly hired director of corporate communications, Cindy McCaffrey, to visit its Mountain View headquarters. One day in October I drove to 2400 Bayshore Parkway, where Google had just moved from its previous location above a Palo Alto bicycle shop. I’d visited a lot of start-ups and wasn’t really surprised by the genial chaos—a vast room, with cubicles yet unfilled and a cluster of exercise balls. However, I hadn’t expected that instead of being attired in traditional T-shirts and jeans, the employees were decked out in costumes. I had come on Halloween.

“Steven, meet Larry Page and Sergey Brin,” said Cindy, introducing me to the two young men who had founded the company as Stanford graduate students. Larry was dressed as a Viking, with a long-haired fur vest and a hat with long antlers protruding. Sergey was in a cow suit. On his chest was a rubber slab from which protruded huge, wart-specked teats. They greeted me cheerfully and we all retreated to a conference room where the Viking and the cow explained the miraculous powers of Google’s PageRank technology.

That was the first of many interviews I would conduct at Google. Over the next few years, the company became a focus of my technology reporting at Newsweek. Google grew from the small start-up I had visited to a behemoth of more than 20,000 employees. Every day, billions of people used its search engine, and Google’s remarkable ability to deliver relevant results in milliseconds changed the way the world got its information. The people who clicked on its ads made Google wildly profitable and turned its founders into billionaires—and triggered an outcry among traditional beneficiaries of ad dollars.

Google also became known for its irreverent culture and its data-driven approach to business decision making; management experts rhapsodized about its unconventional methods. As the years went by, Google began to interpret its mission—to gather and make accessible and useful the world’s information—in the broadest possible sense. The company created a series of web-based applications. It announced its intention to scan all the world’s books. It became involved in satellite imagery, mobile phones, energy generation, photo storage. Clearly, Google was one of the most important contributors to the revolution of computers and technology that marked a turning point in civilization. I knew I wanted to write a book about the company but wasn’t sure how.

Then in early July 2007, I was asked to join the associate product managers on their trip. It was an unprecedented invitation from a company that usually limits contact between journalists and its employees. The APM program, I learned, was a highly valued initiative. To quote the pitch one of the participants made in 2006 to recent and upcoming college graduates: “We invest more into our APMs than any other company has ever invested into young employees.… We envision a world where everyone is awed by the fact that Google’s executives, the best CEOs in the Silicon Valley, and the most respected leaders of global non-profits all came through the Google APM program.” Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, told me, “One of these people will probably be our CEO one day—we just don’t know which one.”

The eighteen APMs on the trip worked all over Google: in search, advertising, applications, and even stealth projects such as Google’s attempt to capture the rights to include magazines in its index. Mayer’s team, along with the APMs themselves, had designed the agenda of the trip. Every activity had an underlying purpose to increase the participants’ understanding of a technology or business issue, or make them more (in the parlance of the company) “Googley.” In Tokyo, for instance, they engaged in a scavenger hunt in the city’s legendary Akihabara electronics district. Teams of APMs were each given $50 to buy the weirdest gadgets they could find. Ducking into backstreets with stalls full of electronic parts and gizmos, they wound up with a cornucopia: USB-powered ashtrays shaped like football helmets that suck up smoke; a plate-sized disk that simulated the phases of the moon; a breathalyzer you could install in your car; and a stubby wand that, when waved back and forth, spelled out words in LED lights. In Bangalore, there was a different shopping hunt—an excursion to the market area where the winner of the competition would be the one who haggled best. (Good training for making bulk purchases of computers or even buying an Internet start-up.) Another Tokyo high point was the 5 A.M. trip to the Tsukiji fish market. It wasn’t the fresh sushi that fascinated the APMs but the mechanics of the fish auction, in some ways similar to the way Google works its AdWords program.

In China, Google’s top executive there, Kai-Fu Lee, talked of balancing Google’s freewheeling style with government rules—and censorship. But during interviews with Chinese consumers, the APMs were discouraged to hear the perception of the company among locals: “Baidu [Google’s local competitor] knows more [about China] than Google,” said one young man to his APM interlocutors.

At every office the APMs visited, they attended meetings with local Googlers, first learning about projects under way and then explaining to the residents what was going on at Mountain View headquarters. I began to get an insider’s sense of Google’s product processes—and how serving its users was akin to a crusade. An interesting moment occurred in Bangalore when Mayer was taking questions from local engineers after presenting an overview of upcoming products. One of them asked, “We’ve heard the road map for products, what’s the road map for revenues?” She almost bit his head off. “That’s not the way to think,” she said. “We are focused on our users. If we make them happy, we will have revenues.”

The most fascinating part of the trip was the time spent with the young Googlers. They were generally from elite colleges, with SAT scores approaching or achieving perfection. Carefully culled from thousands of people who would have killed for the job, their personalities and abilities were a reflection of Google’s own character. During a bus ride to the Great Wall of China, one of the APMs charted the group demographics and found that almost all had parents who were professionals and more than half had parents who taught at a university—which put them in the company of Google’s founders. They all grew up with the Internet and considered its principles to be as natural as the laws of gravity. They were among the brightest and most ambitious of a generation that was better equipped to handle the disruptive technology wave than their elders were. Their minds hummed like tuning forks in resonance with the company’s values of speed, flexibility, and a deep respect for data.

Yet even while immersed in an optimism bubble with these young people, I could see the strains that came with Google’s abrupt growth from a feisty start-up to a market-dominating giant with more than 20,000 employees. The APMs had spent a year navigating the folkways of a complicated corporation, albeit a determinedly different one—and now they were almost senior employees. What’s more, I was stunned when a poll of my fellow travelers revealed that not a single one of them saw him- or herself working for Google in five years. Marissa Mayer took this news calmly, claiming that such ambition was why they had been hired in the first place. “This is the gene that Larry and Sergey look for,” she told me. “Even if they leave, it’s still good for us. They’re going to take the Google DNA with them.” (Almost five years to the day later, Mayer herself would leave Google, to become CEO of the struggling Internet company Yahoo.)

After covering the company for almost a decade, I thought I knew it pretty well, but the rare view of the company I got in those two weeks made me see it in a different, wider light. Still, there were considerable mysteries. Google was a company built on the values of its founders, who harbored ambitions to build a powerful corporation that would impact the entire world, at the same time loathing the bureaucracy and commitments that running such a company would entail. Google professed a sense of moral purity—as exemplified by its informal motto, “Don’t be evil”—but it seemed to have a blind spot regarding the consequences of its own technology on privacy and property rights. A bedrock principle of Google was serving its users—but a goal was building a giant artificial intelligence learning machine that would bring uncertain consequences to the way all of us live. From the very beginning, its founders said that they wanted to change the world. But who were they, and what did they envision this new world order to be?

After the trip I realized that the best way to answer these questions was to report as much as possible from inside Google. Just as I’d had a rare glimpse into its inner workings during that summer of 2007, I would try to immerse myself more deeply into its engineering, its corporate life, and its culture, to report how it really operated, how it developed its products, and how it was managing its growth and public exposure. I would be an outsider with an insider’s view.

To do this, of course, I’d need cooperation. Fortunately, based on our long relationship, Google’s executives, including “LSE”—Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt—agreed to let me in. During the next two years—a critical time when Google’s halo lost some of its glow even as the company grew more powerful—I interviewed hundreds of current and former Googlers and attended a variety of meetings in the company. These included product development meetings, “interface reviews,” search launch meetings, privacy council sessions, weekly TGIF all-hands gatherings, and the gatherings of the high command known as Google Product Strategy (GPS) meetings, where projects and initiatives are approved or rejected. I also ate a lot of meals at Andale, the burrito joint in Google’s Building 43.

What I discovered was a company exulting in creative disorganization, even if the creativity was not always as substantial as hoped for. Google had massive goals, and the entire company channeled its values from the founders. Its mission was collecting and organizing all the world’s information—and that’s only the beginning. From the very start, its founders saw Google as a vehicle to realize the dream of artificial intelligence in augmenting humanity. To realize their dreams, Page and Brin had to build a huge company. At the same time, they attempted to maintain as much as possible the nimble, irreverent, answer-to-no-one freedom of a small start-up. In the two years I researched this book, the clash between those goals reached a peak, as David had become a Goliath.

My inside perspective also provided me the keys to unlock more of the secrets of Google’s two “black boxes”—its search engine and its advertising model—than had previously been disclosed. Google search is part of our lives, and its ad system is the most important commercial product of the Internet age. In this book, for the first time, readers can learn the full story of their development, evolution, and inner workings. Understanding those groundbreaking products helps us understand Google and its employees because their operation embodies both the company’s values and its technological philosophy. More important, understanding them helps us understand our own world—and tomorrow’s.

The science fiction writer William Gibson once said that the future is already here—just not evenly distributed. At Google, the future is already under way. To understand this pioneering company and its people is to grasp our technological destiny. And so here is Google: how it works, what it thinks, why it’s changing, how it will continue to change us. And how it hopes to maintain its soul.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; 1st edition (February 2, 2021)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 464 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1416596593
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1416596592
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 1.18 x 5.55 x 8.35 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #265,516 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #235 in Computers & Technology Industry
- #439 in Company Business Profiles (Books)
- #875 in Biographies of Business & Industrial Professionals

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Customers say

Customers find this book well-researched and packed with detailed information, exploring Google's history and practices in fascinating detail. The writing is easy to read, and one customer notes it reads like a novel. They appreciate the historical look inside Google's minds and find it entertaining, with one review highlighting its amusing anecdotes.

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Insight Readability Writing quality Story telling Enthralling story Look

89 customers mention "Insight"89 positive0 negative

Customers find the book insightful and packed with detailed information about Google, exploring each aspect to fascinating detail.

"In the Plex is an(other) amazing book about my favorite company...." Read more

"...He is able to write about technology in an engaging way, making "In the Plex" and insightful book about how Google works... and how it doesn't..." Read more

"...have heard about what makes Google tick but this book take your behind the scenes from day one and reveals what makes the place tick...." Read more

"I just finished this book. It contains a wealth of information, from Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt and Marrisa Mayer and Salar..." Read more

64 customers mention "Readability"60 positive4 negative

Customers find the book highly readable and entertaining, with one customer noting it reads like a novel.

"...It is well research and was a pleasure to read. I'd recommend it to everyone who wants to have an insight into Google...." Read more

"...The book is well written, easy to read and very entertaining as it takes you through the history of Google, dwelling on the major moments and..." Read more

"...This book is worth your Time. Ah, it is kind of ironic that the "digital text" for this book is "500 bucks", ha...." Read more

"Very enjoyable book. Well articulated...." Read more

35 customers mention "Writing quality"32 positive3 negative

Customers praise the writing quality of the book, finding it well-structured and easy to read, with one customer noting it reads like a novel.

"...The book is structured (as you can read above) really well. It is well written and full with wonderful stories from Googlers...." Read more

"...The book is well written, easy to read and very entertaining as it takes you through the history of Google, dwelling on the major moments and..." Read more

"...As far as bias goes, Levy is a pretty transparent author. He just records things as they are...." Read more

"Very enjoyable book. Well articulated...." Read more

31 customers mention "Story telling"31 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's storytelling approach, with its engaging narrative on Google's history and exploration of the company's minds.

"...It is well written and full with wonderful stories from Googlers. It is well research and was a pleasure to read...." Read more

"...written, easy to read and very entertaining as it takes you through the history of Google, dwelling on the major moments and products that have made..." Read more

"...Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives_ this is basically the biography of a company...." Read more

"...I found this to be a really good narrative on the history of Google - from how it started to where it is today...." Read more

11 customers mention "Enthralling story"11 positive0 negative

Customers find the book's story engaging, with one review highlighting its amusing anecdotes and another noting its dramatic elements.

"PRO: - The book offers a handful of amusing anecdotes -..." Read more

"...It says something that this book kept me interested from start to finish...." Read more

"...The book is also amusing, with Sergey Brin dashing in and out on his roller blades, and various other quirks that make Google fun for the reader as..." Read more

"...Whether it's a funny story about how Larry and Sergey manage this behemoth or another failed product adventure, this book keeps you wanting..." Read more

6 customers mention "Look"6 positive0 negative

Customers like the appearance of the book.

"A fascinating look into the inner workings of Google - the masters of the universe - and who they got that way." Read more

"Good look into the early days of Google." Read more

""In The Plex" provides an eye opening look behind the curtain at Google from a never before seen perspective...." Read more

"Explains Google's history well. I like the style." Read more

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Herve Lebret
The new University of the XXIst century?
Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2015
Verified Purchase

In the Plex is an(other) amazing book about my favorite company. Google is the reason why I wrote a book about start-ups: When I did a PowerPoint presentation in 2006 gathering what I knew about the Mountain View start-up, some friends told me to write a more general book about start-ups. Which I did in 2007. And then a blog...

I have read already three books about Google and this one is as good as the previous ones. Maybe better. So I should thank here Michele Catasta, who advised me to read it when I did last June my updated presentation of the 2006 one. And I should certainly have read before this book published in 2011… I have also posted many articles about the company, just check with the tag Google. But I learnt many things In the Plex, and it is what I want to focus with this post(s). And first with Chapter 1 which is about its technology.

Google was not the only one with the technology

Larry Page was not the only person in 1996 who realized that exploiting the link structure of the web would lead to a dramatically more powerful way to find information. In the summer of that year, a young computer scientist named Jon Kleinberg arrived in California to spend a yearlong postdoctoral fellowship at IBM’s research center in Almaden, on the southern edge of San Jose. With a new PhD from MIT, he had already accepted a tenure-track job in the CS department at Cornell University. […] Kleinberg began to play around with ways to analyze links. Since he didn’t have the assistance, the resources, the time, or the inclination, he didn’t attempt to index the entire web for his link analysis. […] all sorts of IBM vice presidents were trooping through Almaden to look at demos of this thing and trying to think about what they could do with it. ”Ultimately, the answer was … not much”. […] Kleinberg kept up with Google. He turned down job feelers in 1999 and again in 2000. He was happy at Cornell. He’d win teaching awards and a MacArthur fellowship. He led the life in academia he’d set out to lead, and not becoming a billionaire didn’t seem to bother him. [Pages 24-26]

There was yet a third person with the idea, a Chinese engineer named Yanhong (Robin) Li. […] Li came to the United States in 1991 to get a master’s degree at SUNY Buffalo, and in 1994 took a job at IDD Information Services in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, a division of Dow Jones. […] He realized that the Science Citation Index phenomenon could be applied to the Internet. The hypertext link could be regarded as a citation! “When I returned home, I started to write this down and realized it was revolutionary,” he says. He devised a search approach that calculated relevance from both the frequency of links and the content of anchor text. He called his system RankDev. […]Robin Li quit and joined the West Coast search company called Info-seek. In 1999, Disney bought the company and soon thereafter Li returned to China. It was there in Beijing that he would later meet—and compete with—Larry Page and Sergey Brin. [Pages 26-27] (Robin Li is the founder of Baidu.)

The technology was ultimately the best but initially nobody saw the value

Excite would buy BackRub, and then Larry alone would go to work there. Excite’s adoption of BackRub technology, he claimed, would boost its traffic by 10 percent. Extrapolating that in terms of increased ad revenue, Excite would take in $130,000 more every day, for a total of $47 million in a year. Page envisioned his tenure at Excite lasting for seven months, long enough to help the company implement the search engine. Then he would leave, in time for the fall 1997 Stanford semester, resuming his progress toward a doctorate. Excite’s total outlay would be $1.6 million, including $300,000 to Stanford for the license, a $200,000 salary, a $400,000 bonus for implementing it within three months, and $700,000 in Excite stock […] “With my help,” wrote the not-quite-twenty-four-year-old student, “this technology will give Excite a substantial advantage and will propel it to a market leadership position.” Khosla made a tentative counteroffer of $750,000 total. But the deal never happened. [Page 29]

In barely a year since Brin and Page had formed their company, they had gathered a group of top scientists totally committed to the vision of their young founders. These early employees would be part of team efforts that led to innovation after innovation that would broaden Google’s lead over its competitors and establish it as synonymous with search. […] It was at least a ten-day process with one of Google’s first crawl engineers, Harry Cheung (everyone called him Spider-Man), at his machines, monitoring progress of spiders as they spread out through the net and then, after the crawl, breaking down the web pages for the index and calculating the page rank, using Sergey’s complicated system of variables with a mathematical process using something called eigenvectors, while everybody waited for the two processes to converge. (“Math professors love us because Google has made eigenvectors relevant to every matrix algebra student in America,” says Marissa Mayer.) [Page 41]

A technology but not a science… and maybe a dangerous one

In its first few years, Google had developed a number of specialized forms of search, known as verticals, for various corpuses—such as video, images, shopping catalogs, and locations (maps). Krishna Bharat had created one of those verticals called Google News, a virtual wire service with a front page determined not by editors but algorithms. Another vertical product, called Google Scholar, accessed academic journals. But to access those verticals, users had to choose the vertical. Page and Brin were pushing for a system where one search would find Everything. [Something called Universal Search]. [Page 58]

When the Universal Search team showed a prototype to Google’s top executives, everyone realized that taking on the project […] had been worth it. The results in that early attempt were all in the wrong order, but the reaction was visceral—you typed in a word, and all this stuff came out. It had just never happened before. “It definitely was one of the riskier things,” says Bailey. “It was hard, because it’s not just science—there are some judgment calls involved here. We are to some degree using our gut. I still get up in the morning and am astonished that this whole thing even works.” Google’s search now wasn’t just searching the web. It was searching everything. In his 1991 book, Mirror Worlds, Yale computer scientist David Gelernter sketched out a future where humans would interact, and transact, with modeled digital representations of the real world. […] But though Gelernter looked on the overall prospect of mirror worlds with enthusiasm, he worried as well. “I definitely feel ambivalent about mirror worlds. There are obvious risks of surveillance, but I think it poses deeper risks,” he said. His main concern was that mirror worlds would be steered by the geeky corporations who built them, as opposed to the public. “These risks should be confronted by society at large, not by techno-nerds,” he said. “I don’t trust them. They are not broad-minded and don’t know enough. They don’t know enough history, they don’t have enough. [Page 59-60]

Google’s researchers would acknowledge that working with a learning system of this size put them into uncharted territory. The steady improvement of its learning system flirted with the consequences postulated by scientist and philosopher Raymond Kurzweil, who speculated about an impending “singularity” that would come when a massive computer system evolves its way to intelligence. Larry Page was an enthusiastic follower of Kurzweil and a key supporter of Kurzweil-inspired Singularity University, an educational enterprise that anticipates a day when humans will pass the consciousness baton to our inorganic progeny. [Page would hire Kurzweil in 2012 ]What does it mean to say that Google “knows” something? […] “That’s a very deep question,” says Spector. “Humans, really, are big bags of mostly water walking around with a lot of tubes and some neurons and all. But we’re knowledgeable. So now look at the Google cluster computing system. It’s a set of many heuristics, so it knows ‘vehicle’ is a synonym for ‘automobile,’ and it knows that in French it’s voiture, and it knows it in German and every language. It knows these things. And it knows many more things that it’s learned from what people type.” […] Spector promised that Google would learn much, much more in coming years. “Do these things rise to the level of knowledge?” he asks rhetorically. “My ten-year-olds believe it. They think Google knows a lot. If you asked anyone in their grade school class, I think the kids would say yes.” What did Spector, a scientist, think? “I’m afraid that it’s not a question that is amenable to a scientific answer,” he says. “I do think, however, loosely speaking, Google is knowledgeable. The question is, will we build a general-purpose intelligence which just sits there, looks around, then develops all those skills unto itself, no matter what they are, whether it’s medical diagnosis or …” Spector pauses. “That’s a long way off,” he says. “That will probably not be done within my career at Google.” (Spector was fifty-five at the time of the conversation in early 2010.) “I think Larry would very much like to see that happen,” he adds. [Page 66-67]

As a final comment read the book (and more on my blog too)

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Bas Vodde
Hackers insight into Google
Reviewed in the United States on June 20, 2013
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If you'd ask me, which technology journalist should write a book about Google, then Steven Levy would be high on my list. Steven's been around for a long time and wrote the excellent "Hackers" and the not so excellent "The Perfect Thing." He is able to write about technology in an engaging way, making "In the Plex" and insightful book about how Google works... and how it doesn't work.

The book is roughly organized around products (or projects). Since the book is about Google, it must start with the world of search and how Google was founded in Standford. How the two Googler founders were free-thinking Montessori idealists with an huge interest and background in technology stumbled on the idea of raking based on 'citations' and creating the world changing search -- google.com. It provides interesting stories about how advanced the Google search actually is and how it tried to learn from all the data it collects.

The second chapter takes Google from the start-up to a profitable company with Google Ads. The uncool product that became a cool product by changing the perspective from "boring ads" to an interesting technological problem. How to make ads useful? Introducing the auction, removing any middle-man and just do it based on data and algorithms was the trick Google used to ruin the existing markets of ads... or should I say, take it over. The Google Ads did lead to profit, which in turn lead to growth and...

To chapter 3 and an IPO. Google was funded based on VC money and they will expect to go public, so they can get their investment back. But Google didn't want to do that the traditional way... no... it had to be different. Nerdier, Googlier. They wanted to also disrupt the financial world, but that financial world didn't take Google too serious. It caused a lot of frustration, especially when Google stressed it's value of "Don't do Evil" which wasn't taken too serious by the (perhaps Evil) Wall Street firms. Eventually they succeeded, got lots of cash, so what do you do...

On to chapter 4 which starts with the invention of gmail and the need for more and more storage and computer power. This is the chapter where Google became really impressive as they changed the fiber and data centre world. Originally they ran in other company data centres, but eventually they figured they could do it better and build huge, secret data centres. Data centres need fast internet connections and power, so they actually bought most of the fiber connections, becoming one of the largest... cable companies.. I guess. They also made they move into power, but that is still undergoing. With the owning of the huge data centres, Google basically owned every aspect of their business and removed most dependencies. Now, they needed to show that they can do more than search/ads/mail, so...

Chapter 5 follows how Google tried different markets, first with Android and then with YouTube. As a company, being dependent on one market is risky, so expanding to others and increasing traffic and using your core assets (data centres) sounds logical. First into mobile making an operating systems (basically, together with Apple, killing Nokia), then a browser and becoming an active player in the 'second browser wars' and eventually buying YouTube to "go into video." These expanded Googles markets and made it less reliable on search only.

So, whats left? The rest of the world. Google began expanding in other countries from Chapter 6. The most interesting story is, of course, China where the corrupt government insists on stealing freedom from people by censoring the internet... a clear evil thing to do. So, do you play ball and try, from inside, to gradually open up the internet or do you refuse. Google went in... with a regret. The government considered it won and simply needed to push more and more rules otherwise it could simple remove the connectivity. Google shall listen. Google didn't like that and corrected its mistake after being hacked by the government. Painful. (The book doesn't share the wonderful details on how the government censorship simply makes google service look bad, missed opportunity, perhaps Steven needs to live in China for a while).

The US government is a lot better, right? Not really. It might be less corrupt, but it still is. Chapter 7 describes how some Googlers tried to help the Obama administration but were stifled by the bureaucracy. Also, competitors started lobbying more and more against Google, so they require Lobbyists too, which doesn't seem to be evil. The biggest legal problems came, of course, from the Google library project. Scanning all the world books is certainly evil, right?

Most of the book is exceptional positive about Google. The last chapter, Epilogue, suddenly changes its tone and shows how Google missed the boat on social networking, mostly because of how the company works. Also people became frustrated with Google, left, and started all kinds of wonderful companies such as Twitter, Foursquare, or left to join Facebook. Painful. Perhaps Google is now too big and traditional and will need to be replaced with a more modern company... facebook?

The book is structured (as you can read above) really well. It is well written and full with wonderful stories from Googlers. It is well research and was a pleasure to read. I'd recommend it to everyone who wants to have an insight into Google. It is probably better than some of the other Google-books. I'd rate if 4 stars, but not 5. Why? At times, I was disappointed with the technical inaccuracies in the book. Also, some points were left a bit too open. Last, it felt parts were missing, such as mentioning of the Google X projects or the Google Apps infrastructure. These seem like important new markets of Google, but it wasn't mentioned. So, an excellent book and definitively recommended, but not perfect.

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Robert D. Crane
To know is to understand
Reviewed in the United States on July 17, 2011
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I really like books that give you a history of a business. I especially like books that give you a history of technology businesses because they are usually so current. This is exactly the case with this book.

Many have heard about what makes Google tick but this book take your behind the scenes from day one and reveals what makes the place tick. It demonstrates how Google is really an extension of the personalities of Sergey and Larry. Reading the book helps you to better understand why Google does the things that it does and its whole approach to business. This is extremely beneficial given that fact that most people use a Google product every day.

The book is well written, easy to read and very entertaining as it takes you through the history of Google, dwelling on the major moments and products that have made it the colossus that it is today. It is very interesting to see how major products like Gmail grew from extreme small, almost hobby like projects into the features of mass culture they are today.

Most importantly of all it it gives you fantastic insight into the way Google thinks, how it make decisions and most importantly what it sees its mission in the world. As they say, knowing is understanding and with this book you'll certainly be more knowledgeable about what makes Google tick.

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Max
Great book on Google
Reviewed in Italy on May 31, 2012
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I have read many books on Google, and so far this one has been the best. It seems apparent that the author gained first-hand access to Google's top management. In fact facts and ideas are recounted as if the author had experienced them in person. Google's history is told from the very (legendary) garage-based start to the launch of Google + when the company eventually tries to get serious about its commitment to social networks. Levy describes all the successful (i.e.adwords, adsense, gmail, chrome, earth, streetview, etc.) and not so successful (buzz, okurt, etc.) Google products in detail, as well as the internal workings which led to their launch and the relevant legal implications (intellectual property and copyright issues, data privacy and antitrust ). This is really a fascinating book and one of the best technology reads I have enjoyed for some time.

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Pratik Potnis
What it takes to be Google
Reviewed in India on August 27, 2022
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Steven Levy has captured date by date progress of Google. It's a story that has and will inspire generations !

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Pratik Potnis

What it takes to be Google

Reviewed in India on August 27, 2022
Steven Levy has captured date by date progress of Google. It's a story that has and will inspire generations !

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Christopher Parsons
Important read for Google-watchers
Reviewed in Canada on January 25, 2013
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This book holistically explores the history and various products of Google Inc. The book’s significance comes from Levy’s ongoing access to various Google employees, attendance at company events and product discussions, and other Google-related cultural and business elements since the company’s inception in 1999. In essence, Levy provides us with a superb – if sometimes favourably biased – account of Google’s growth and development.

The book covers Google’s successes, failures, and difficulties as it grew from a graduate project at Stanford University to the multi-billion dollar business it is today. Throughout we see just how important algorithmic learning and automation is; core to Google’s business philosophy is that using humans to rank or evaluate things “was out of the question. First, it was inherently impractical. Further, humans were unreliable. Only algorithms – well drawn, efficiently executed, and based on sound data – could deliver unbiased results” (p. 16). This attitude of the ‘pure algorithm’ is pervasive; translation between languages is just an information problem that can – through suitable algorithms – accurately and effectively translate even the cultural uniqueness that is linked to languages. Moreover, when Google’s search algorithms routinely display anti-Semitic websites after searching for “Jew” the founders refused to modify the search algorithms because the algorithms had “spoke” and “Brin’s ideals, no matter how heartfelt, could not justify intervention. “I feel like I shouldn’t impose my beliefs on the world,” he said. “It’s a bad technology practice”" (p. 275). This is an important statement: the founders see the product of human mathematical ingenuity as non-human and lacking bias born of their human creation.

This conception of the ‘pure’ and ‘good’ algorithm that is devoid of human bias drove the aesthetic development of the Google’s products line, insofar as “the message Google wanted to convey was that its products had no human bias” (p. 207). Calling their mobile operating system Android is clearly linked with this popular conception: the device is distinct from humanity and independent of it past creation; creation itself (seemingly) is not seen as establishing particular narratives, biases, ethics, or other determining contingencies. Similar conceptions drove the naming of Google’s web browser, Chrome.

Though the algorithm might be seen as pure, actions surrounding those mathematical equations and code are often wrapped in ethical and political questions inside of the company. Ethical questions arose when the GMail team discussed inserting ads based on data mining email. There were strong worries at Google that this behaviour was “just going to be creepy and weird”, though the company’s founders “were really entranced by it . . . We felt like, ‘Wow, something was mentioned in my email and I actually got an ad that was relevant!’ That was amazing. We thought that was a great thing.” As for the potential blowback, Brin says, “We didn’t give it a second thought. There were plenty of things to question, but I never batted an eyelash at that. It never occurred to me as a privacy thing” (p. 170-1). This issue of privacy, highlighted in the middle of the book, returns with a fury towards the conclusion when Levy examines Google’s involvement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

In Levy’s discussion of the DoubleClick acquisition we learn a great deal about Google’s corporate behaviours. The FTC investigated the potential implications of DoubleClick’s acquisition and ultimately permitted Google’s purchase. After explaining, in quite some depth, the significance of Google’s potential acquisition of the company Levy writes that the FTC investigation “failed to perceive the admittedly complicated privacy implications that were unique in this case. For its part, Google helped foment misunderstanding by not being clear about the unprecedented benefits it would gain in tracking consumer behaviour . . . the DoubleClick cookie provided a potentially voluminous amount of information about its users and their interests, virtually all of it compiled by stealth” (p. 333). While Google’s actions here are not terribly surprising – we somewhat cynically expect companies to struggle to increase their revenues within the confines of the law – they are telling: DoubleClick’s acquisition was key to Google’s continuing dominance of the online advertising marketshare and, as such, if government couldn’t find out it was coming to a bad conclusion then Google wasn’t going to help correct that conclusion.

Questions of ethics also arose around the problem of video-based copyright infringement. Key people at Google felt, and presumably still feel, that such infringement “when you come right down to it” is “evil” (p. 229). Similarly there were serious questions around what is an inappropriate degree of censorship to incorporate into the company’s Search product, questions that were prominently raised not just when Eric Schmidt tried (and failed) to remove some search results about himself but also when Google entered the Chinese search market.

Indeed, it is the many-page account of Google’s troubles in China that are amongst the most important – and revealing – in Levy’s book. To begin, from the book we discover that there were intense debates within Google about the appropriateness of even doing business in the country, with the company’s chief policy directory Andrew McLaughlin strongly arguing against launching business in China. McLaughlin lost the argument but, upon entering the Chinese market, another problem arose for Google: a cult culture arose around the Googler in charge of China, Kai-Fu, which was seen as very ‘non-Googley’. There were also culturally-driven missteps, including gifts that were (mis)perceived as bribes and other cross-cultural frictions.

These cultural issues, however, paled in the face of determining what the company would censor in their Search products. Specifically, there was a problem in “determining what information should not be given to Chinese users. Though the government demanded censorship, it didn’t hand out a complete list of what wasn’t allowed. Following the law required self-censorship, with the implicit risk that if a company failed to block information that the Chinese government didn’t want its citizens to see, it could lose its license.” To deal with the problem Google examined and probed “the sites of competitors, such as China’s top search engine, Baidu, testing them with risky keywords and see what they blocked” (280). This was seen as both technically and politically (and, perhaps, ethically) savvy: Google itself would not engage in censorship beyond the censorship that already existed in the Chinese market.

This process of navigating the Chinese business, cultural, and censorial environment forced Google to establish differing security permissions between their North American and Chinese operations. It wasn’t that the company’s executives didn’t trust their Chinese engineers but that “when you go to a place like China, there’s lots of examples of companies where intellectual property has gone out the door.” Moreover, the company’s engineering director was “concerned that employees in China who were Chinese nationals might be asked by government officials to disclose personal information, and all our access policies derived from that” (p. 301). So, in essence, it wasn’t that Google was necessarily worried about specific engineers but about the social situation and governmental pressures that could be applied to engineers, and thus affect their behaviour and actions.

While Google worried about data exfiltration by employees, it established even more extensive security precautions after some of its Beijing employees succumbed to spearphishing. The consequence of this successful attack was the theft of confidential security code. Though Levy’s book just offers a brief account of the attack on Gaia, Google’s master password system, it succinctly draws together the body of public writing on the topic and boils that writing down in terms that the layperson can both appreciate and understand. This data was subsequently used to gather information about Chinese dissidents who used Google’s products: Google, though being compromised, acted as a boon to the Chinese state in its efforts to surveil and suppress dissenting members of its population.

In the end, this book is incredibly useful for anyone interested in corporate growth, privacy, or corporate-government relations. It’s also, obviously, of interest to “Google-watchers”. Levy has brought significant insights to how Google developed and why certain paths and decisions were chosen over others. He is routinely attentive to the ‘big picture’, or how Google’s services interact with one another and with the world. Though not covered in the review, there are interesting bits and pieces around the company’s relationship with telecommunications carriers and spectrum policy, hardware development, business secrecy, and other topics sure to interest policymakers, scholars, business readers, and the generally interested member of the public. Without any doubt, this is one of the ‘must buy’ books about big data, big corporations, and one of the biggest information giants that collects and controls vast amount of the world’s information.

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C. H.
Einblick in Google
Reviewed in Germany on February 6, 2013
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Ein gutes Buch um hinter die Kulissen von Google zu blicken und die Philosophie zu verstehen.
Leider nur auf englisch.

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Pawel Kozela
Très bon livre pour comprendre les enjeux des technologies du 21ième siècle
Reviewed in France on July 21, 2012
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Je l'ai lu car il était recommandé par Charlie Munger et je n'ai pas été deçu (en même temps, je le suis très rarement avec les livres qu'il conseille...). L'histoire de Google est passionnante et tout au long on découvre une reflexion plus large sur la morale et l'éthique de l'internet et de l'ère de l'information, dans laquelle on vit.

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