The Great God Google

The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry), by Siva Vaidhyanathan. 265 pp. University of California Press. $26.95.

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: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, convincingly proves.

Levy chronicles how two Stanford University computer science graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founded the company that gave search primacy on the Web. Although it seems obvious now that the best way to speed navigation as the Web expanded at Big Bang velocity in the 1990s was going to be better search engines, many leading Internet companies, such as Microsoft and America Online, were more enthusiastic about pushing "portals" and "channels" that sent inquiring users to curated Web pages. Epitomizing the industry's low interest in search was Microsoft, which by February 1998 was still mired in the planning stages to construct its own search engine.

Page and Brin's remarkable idea, which they started to develop in 1996, exploits the structure of Web links to locate relevant and valuable information. "Important pages tended to link to important pages," Page said. His PageRank algorithm, based on this important-pages-links-to-important-pages principle, assesses links indexed from the Web and spits out the most relevant pages to match the search terms submitted. Launched in 1998, Google blew past its competition--AltaVista, HotBot, Infoseek and the rest--to become the search leader.

Although the Google search engine was miraculous compared with the others, not everyone in the business appreciated the breakthrough sufficiently. Google licensed its search engine to Yahoo in 2000, and it increased Yahoo traffic by 50 percent in two months, one Google executive tells Levy. But instead of praising it, Yahoo complained that users were searching too much, which meant that the company had to pay higher licensing fees to Google.

Page and Brin's restlessness and certainty in their belief that life is an engineering problem dominates Levy's book. The confident duo were eager to expand Google's search capacity before they had a business model beyond search-engine licensing. "Adult supervisors" such as veteran executive Eric Schmidt, who was brought in early to serve as Google's CEO and chairman, are continually brushed aside as the two insist on building bigger when big is supposed to be large enough, and invading new provinces before consolidating their previous conquests. Their disruptive company has steadily marched into market after market to remake them. First search, then advertising, then on to e-mail, Web applications, Web video, Internet telephony and ultimately into operating systems and mobile phones.

Levy, a veteran technology journalist who reported his book with the cooperation of Google, makes obsolete previous books on the company by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, John Battelle and Ken Auletta. My only quarrel with his telling is its verging into the hagiographic on the margins, for instance when it describes the mental gymnastics that Google makes job applicants fly through. Microsoft, Apple and other tech companies have been torturing applicants with similar mind games for more than two decades, and this recruitment tactic doesn't guarantee that all new hires will be brilliant employees, nor does it ensure the continued success of the firm.

Google may look invincible today, but Levy reports on its embarrassing miscues, including homegrown flops like Orkut, Wave and Buzz, and others that it acquired, such as the social networking software provider Dodgeball and the radio-advertising company dMarc Broadcasting. His detailed reporting of Google Books, an attempt to rewrite copyright law through a legal settlement, also reveals a skeezy side to the company, one that a top Google lawyer concedes to Levy. "Google's leadership doesn't care terribly much about precedent or law," Alex Macgillivray tells Levy. "They're trying to get a product launched, in this case trying to make books easier to find."

In the Plex's last chapter finds Google pestered by a resurgent Microsoft, whose Bing search engine it feels compelled to imitate, and by Twitter, the lightweight social-media powerhouse. But its most serious competition is the post-search-engine company Facebook, another remarkable idea whose time is ripe and whose execution is superb. If Levy hasn't already sold his Google-versus-Facebook book proposal, the industry follower in me would be very disappointed.

The appreciation that all technological dominance is fleeting, that today's Google is tomorrow's America Online, would have improved Siva Vaidhyanathan's well-researched book The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) . Vaidhyanathan fears Google because it "sets its own rules" and crowds "out other alternatives" with its successes. That's true, of course, but it's true of every company that provides a good service at an affordable price--and in Google's case, the price is close to free.

Besides the company's pure market power, Vaidhyanathan fears the triumph of technocracy that the Google ascendancy represents. He frets about the erosion of privacy and the rise of mass surveillance made possible by Google and its competitors. And he despises the thought that the Google Books deal and other information grabs will make it the "custodian of our most precious cultural and scientific resources."

Vaidhyanathan advises that we prevent the Googlization of everything with a "Human Knowledge Project" led by libraries, thinkers and designers and assisted by corporations like Google to create a "global information ecosystem." This scheme sounds a little like a merger of NPR, the United Nations and that group house from your college days: There's a lot of promise here, folks, but who is going to clean the bathroom and the kitchen?

That's a tad too harsh. We need writers like Vaidhyanathan to administer the antidote whenever we overdose on the sort of cyber-utopianism Google famously vended in its "don't be evil" promise. Let's just make sure not to overdose on the antidote.