Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know
by Randall Stross
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Manufacturer: Free Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.76102504
EAN: 9781416546917
ISBN: 141654691X
Label: Free Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2008-09-23
Publisher: Free Press
Release Date: 2008-09-18
Studio: Free Press
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Accidental millionaires?
Comment: An interesting book about the history of Google, and many of the projects it's undertaken over the years. Most of projects would be impossible to pursue without the revenue Google rakes in with it's search advertising program.
Somehow this otherwise fine story about Google omits the full story about it's FINANCIAL success. Almost all of Google's revenue is from it's search engine advertising, which the founders resisted introducing because they felt it was inconsistent with their objectives.
Google's search engine ads are based on a model pioneered by GoTo -- later renamed Overture, then purchased by Yahoo! -- in the late 90's. A year or two after GoTo demonstrated the viability of such a model, Google started their own search engine advertising. Google's program rapidly became the success it did because their basic search engine was superior, and preferred by the public. I've used all 3 services to advertise an online business over the years. Google ads (and regular searches) have received BY FAR the most hits.
I'm a big fan of Google, and use many of their services. That said, I wonder how much longer their current business model will work where ad revenues are financing everything they do.
Customer Rating:
Summary: For those interested in what Google has been up to
Comment: For readers who appreciated The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, this book loosely picks up where the former book sort of left off. "The Search" (by different author and published in 2005) covers the origin and growth of general Web search technology and the rise of Google the company up to the point shortly after its IPO. "Planet Google" mainly takes a look at what the company has been doing since (circa 2004-08) and focuses on Google's many attempted forays into products and technologies beyond the core Web search. A chapter is dedicated for each of Google's better-known endeavors, namely book digitization, video/YouTube, Google Earth/Maps, datacenter buildup, Gmail and privacy issues, the go for open-source everything, and the debate of machine-only vs. human-assisted search algorithm.
The author claims to enjoy fairly generous access to Google's facilities and some of its top executives, including CEO Eric Schmidt. The book provides a quick read and is much shorter than the number of pages would suggest as the last 75 pages contain only massive amount of footnotes. It will certainly delight those who have always been fascinated by everything Google.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent narration with poor analysis
Comment: The book's title flatters to deceive. The "audacious plan to organize everything we know" has significant impacts on almost all aspects of our lives and how new IT business models emerge - privacy, accessibility, level playing ground for education, security, etc..; growth of software-as-a-service and service-oriented architecture. Despite these meaty issues that the author's premise would have allowed him to provide an in-depth analysis of the trends and implications, he chooses to provide a superficial narration that reads more like a Businessweek article. To be fair, the author did write a few sentences on the above topics, but only as an introduction to his narration of some of the behind-the-scenes incidents that shaped Google's growth. After various authors have done this before, (more notable example - The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time and The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture), this book breaks relatively new ground for even a casual reader in this space. Nevertheless, the narrations discussing the algorithm itself, and Google's foray into video search and Youtube, travails with Google Answers, email scanning and search, the ambitious book scanning project, and growth pains of Google Maps are entertaining and provides some interesting tidbits. For someone familiar with the search space and avid user of Google, some of these discussions may seem yesterday's news.
Even if it is not, the author misses an opportunity to analyze the fundamental impact Google's 'audacious plan' can have on us. The most glaring omission is Google Health - here is an attempt by Google to develop an ecosystem that stores electronic health records and allows other service providers to tap into this information as and when the owner of the health record permits. The implications of this can be far-reaching and a game changer for how healthcare is viewed in the world, particularly in the U.S. There is perhaps one tangential reference to Google Health in the book.
The book is well narrated, with a sense of urgency that keeps the reader captivated. The notes section of the book is well-organized and provides additional citations and information for the more serious reader (in fact, if some of the information that are now hidden in the notes section had found its way to the main text, the book may have read better). Overall, an entertaining read, but providing no or superficial analysis/insights.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but Too Inclusive!
Comment: Early in "Planet Google" Stross points out that Google's income reached $4.2 billion in 2997 - 99% from the simple text ads that accompany its search returns. Readers also learn that 68% of Internet searches use Google. Thus, one suspects that at least some of Google's current new activities (eg. creating a digital library of all books, providing video search capability, server-supplied software and central data storage, StreetView, translating between languages, voice-to-text capability) are a dangerous distraction from Google's main business (especially creating a digital library of all books - strongly fought by publishers and still lacking an income-generating plan, as well as the book. Similarly, video search is also opposed on copyright grounds, while StreetView has been lambasted as an invasion of privacy and aid to terrorists, GMail blasted as "creepy" for providing ads based on message content, and Google News also attacked on a copyright basis.
Stross also is oblivious to the fact that eventually other Internet-search engines will catch up with Google, its search services will become a much-cheaper commodity, and the company's ability to reward and retain staff will precipitously decline. (It's called "product-life cycle," taught in every business school, and there are no long-term antidotes.) Further, Stross woefully short-circuits a key current and future problem - Google's data-center energy costs - undoubtedly because Google doesn't want to discuss it. Finally, Google's page ranking and Web-searching algorithms do not receive enough attention, while "open" vs. "closed" source coding receives entirely too much.
Nonetheless, "Google Earth" is mostly interesting reading. Google's power derives from the accidental discovery, two years after its founding, that plain text ads on its search pages produce enormous profits. Another key innovation was its requiring that ads be directly relevant to the search and ranking them according to projected income to Google (bid/click X probability of being clicked).
Google's search engine did not start out perfect - 1998 queries sometimes took ten seconds. In 1999 the search engine reviewed only 60 million sites, but the company then aggressively set a goal for 1 billion - at the time, AltaVista, its largest competitor, indexed only 150 million. (Google indexed 8 billion Web pages by 2004, the last year it made data available.) Another important Google advantage was gained by choosing to use low-cost standard PCs as servers, vs. competitors' choosing more expensive, specialized machines. Still another important decision was to avoid human involvement in the search output, contrary to Yahoo, which of course eventually found this approach too slow and expensive.
Bottom Line: Google benefited from lucky and judicious decisions early in its history, as well as very well designed software; however, it now risks sliding downhill by trying to do too many things.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very interesting story on Google. I give it 5 stars for sure.
Comment: Very interesting story on Google. I give it 5 stars for sure. You don't see many people actually telling the actual google Story, so I thought it was a great idea for this author to cover it.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Accidental millionaires?
Comment: An interesting book about the history of Google, and many of the projects it's undertaken over the years. Most of projects would be impossible to pursue without the revenue Google rakes in with it's search advertising program.
Somehow this otherwise fine story about Google omits the full story about it's FINANCIAL success. Almost all of Google's revenue is from it's search engine advertising, which the founders resisted introducing because they felt it was inconsistent with their objectives.
Google's search engine ads are based on a model pioneered by GoTo -- later renamed Overture, then purchased by Yahoo! -- in the late 90's. A year or two after GoTo demonstrated the viability of such a model, Google started their own search engine advertising. Google's program rapidly became the success it did because their basic search engine was superior, and preferred by the public. I've used all 3 services to advertise an online business over the years. Google ads (and regular searches) have received BY FAR the most hits.
I'm a big fan of Google, and use many of their services. That said, I wonder how much longer their current business model will work where ad revenues are financing everything they do.
Customer Rating:
Summary: For those interested in what Google has been up to
Comment: For readers who appreciated The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, this book loosely picks up where the former book sort of left off. "The Search" (by different author and published in 2005) covers the origin and growth of general Web search technology and the rise of Google the company up to the point shortly after its IPO. "Planet Google" mainly takes a look at what the company has been doing since (circa 2004-08) and focuses on Google's many attempted forays into products and technologies beyond the core Web search. A chapter is dedicated for each of Google's better-known endeavors, namely book digitization, video/YouTube, Google Earth/Maps, datacenter buildup, Gmail and privacy issues, the go for open-source everything, and the debate of machine-only vs. human-assisted search algorithm.
The author claims to enjoy fairly generous access to Google's facilities and some of its top executives, including CEO Eric Schmidt. The book provides a quick read and is much shorter than the number of pages would suggest as the last 75 pages contain only massive amount of footnotes. It will certainly delight those who have always been fascinated by everything Google.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent narration with poor analysis
Comment: The book's title flatters to deceive. The "audacious plan to organize everything we know" has significant impacts on almost all aspects of our lives and how new IT business models emerge - privacy, accessibility, level playing ground for education, security, etc..; growth of software-as-a-service and service-oriented architecture. Despite these meaty issues that the author's premise would have allowed him to provide an in-depth analysis of the trends and implications, he chooses to provide a superficial narration that reads more like a Businessweek article. To be fair, the author did write a few sentences on the above topics, but only as an introduction to his narration of some of the behind-the-scenes incidents that shaped Google's growth. After various authors have done this before, (more notable example - The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time and The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture), this book breaks relatively new ground for even a casual reader in this space. Nevertheless, the narrations discussing the algorithm itself, and Google's foray into video search and Youtube, travails with Google Answers, email scanning and search, the ambitious book scanning project, and growth pains of Google Maps are entertaining and provides some interesting tidbits. For someone familiar with the search space and avid user of Google, some of these discussions may seem yesterday's news.
Even if it is not, the author misses an opportunity to analyze the fundamental impact Google's 'audacious plan' can have on us. The most glaring omission is Google Health - here is an attempt by Google to develop an ecosystem that stores electronic health records and allows other service providers to tap into this information as and when the owner of the health record permits. The implications of this can be far-reaching and a game changer for how healthcare is viewed in the world, particularly in the U.S. There is perhaps one tangential reference to Google Health in the book.
The book is well narrated, with a sense of urgency that keeps the reader captivated. The notes section of the book is well-organized and provides additional citations and information for the more serious reader (in fact, if some of the information that are now hidden in the notes section had found its way to the main text, the book may have read better). Overall, an entertaining read, but providing no or superficial analysis/insights.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but Too Inclusive!
Comment: Early in "Planet Google" Stross points out that Google's income reached $4.2 billion in 2997 - 99% from the simple text ads that accompany its search returns. Readers also learn that 68% of Internet searches use Google. Thus, one suspects that at least some of Google's current new activities (eg. creating a digital library of all books, providing video search capability, server-supplied software and central data storage, StreetView, translating between languages, voice-to-text capability) are a dangerous distraction from Google's main business (especially creating a digital library of all books - strongly fought by publishers and still lacking an income-generating plan, as well as the book. Similarly, video search is also opposed on copyright grounds, while StreetView has been lambasted as an invasion of privacy and aid to terrorists, GMail blasted as "creepy" for providing ads based on message content, and Google News also attacked on a copyright basis.
Stross also is oblivious to the fact that eventually other Internet-search engines will catch up with Google, its search services will become a much-cheaper commodity, and the company's ability to reward and retain staff will precipitously decline. (It's called "product-life cycle," taught in every business school, and there are no long-term antidotes.) Further, Stross woefully short-circuits a key current and future problem - Google's data-center energy costs - undoubtedly because Google doesn't want to discuss it. Finally, Google's page ranking and Web-searching algorithms do not receive enough attention, while "open" vs. "closed" source coding receives entirely too much.
Nonetheless, "Google Earth" is mostly interesting reading. Google's power derives from the accidental discovery, two years after its founding, that plain text ads on its search pages produce enormous profits. Another key innovation was its requiring that ads be directly relevant to the search and ranking them according to projected income to Google (bid/click X probability of being clicked).
Google's search engine did not start out perfect - 1998 queries sometimes took ten seconds. In 1999 the search engine reviewed only 60 million sites, but the company then aggressively set a goal for 1 billion - at the time, AltaVista, its largest competitor, indexed only 150 million. (Google indexed 8 billion Web pages by 2004, the last year it made data available.) Another important Google advantage was gained by choosing to use low-cost standard PCs as servers, vs. competitors' choosing more expensive, specialized machines. Still another important decision was to avoid human involvement in the search output, contrary to Yahoo, which of course eventually found this approach too slow and expensive.
Bottom Line: Google benefited from lucky and judicious decisions early in its history, as well as very well designed software; however, it now risks sliding downhill by trying to do too many things.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very interesting story on Google. I give it 5 stars for sure.
Comment: Very interesting story on Google. I give it 5 stars for sure. You don't see many people actually telling the actual google Story, so I thought it was a great idea for this author to cover it.
Based on unprecedented access he received to the highly secretive "Googleplex," acclaimed New York Times columnist Randall Stross takes readers deep inside Google, the most important, most innovative, and most ambitious company of the Internet Age. His revelations demystify the strategy behind the company's recent flurry of bold moves, all driven by the pursuit of a business plan unlike any other: to become the indispensable gatekeeper of all the world's information, the one-stop destination for all our information needs. Will Google succeed? And what are the implications of a single company commanding so much information and knowing so much about us?As ambitious as Google's goal is, with 68 percent of all Web searches (and growing), profits that are the envy of the business world, and a surplus of talent, the company is, Stross shows, well along the way to fulfilling its ambition, becoming as dominant a force on the Web as Microsoft became on the PC. Google isn't just a superior search service anymore. In recent years it has launched a dizzying array of new services and advanced into whole new businesses, from the introductions of its controversial Book Search and the irresistible Google Earth, to bidding for a slice of the wireless-phone spectrum and nonchalantly purchasing YouTube for $1.65 billion. Google has also taken direct aim at Microsoft's core business, offering free e-mail and software from word processing to spreadsheets and calendars, pushing a transformative -- and highly disruptive -- concept known as "cloud computing." According to this plan, users will increasingly store all of their data on Google's massive servers -- a network of a million computers that amounts to the world's largest supercomputer, with unlimited capacity to house all the information Google seeks. The more offerings Google adds, and the more ubiquitous a presence it becomes, the more dependent its users become on its services and the more information they contribute to its uniquely comprehensive collection of data. Will Google stay true to its famous "Don't Be Evil" mantra, using its power in its customers' best interests? Stross's access to those who have spearheaded so many of Google's new initiatives, his penetrating research into the company's strategy, and his gift for lively storytelling produce an entertaining, deeply informed, and provocative examination of the company's audacious vision for the future and the consequences not only for the business world, but for our culture at large.
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