The Google Story: Google's Secrect Open to the Public

Google has many blogs run by its many fractured departments, and one of them is the Google Research Blog. Not kept updated nearly as often as the Google Blog, but it presented me with this rather interesting post on videos.

One of them is about "The Google Story", a book written by David Vise and Mark Malseed and published in August of 2006. I read in December of 2006. He was invited to Google to speak about the book and his reasons for writing it.

What struck me as funny, however, was at the beginning with Eric Schmidt is introducing him and saying the book is a "best seller." I couldn't help but laugh, and I'm willing to bet Mr. Schmidt said it with a good deal of sarcasm. The book is practically invisible on any bookshelf, which is a shame. It appears, however, more than John Battelle's equally interesting book "The Search: How Google and its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture".

"The Google Story" is most likely going to be the only definitive inside look at Google. Mr. Vise is correct when he states the "Google knows more about you than you know about Google" and though his efforts to bridge that gap should be applauded, it still falls short when you measure the information in the book against the amount of information that Google collects on just a daily basis. He, like the rest of us (myself included to some extent), has been enamored of Google, and his book exudes praise that no doubt anger privacy advocates. It is not until you put his book together with Mr. Battelle's that you begin to see the bigger picture, all the pieces coming more into focus. Search is on track to fulfill the predictions made by Mr. Battelle, and Google is leading the way as Mr. Vise discusses.

It strikes me as odd that a company that receives so much publicity, both good and bad, has a book out on it that has not climbed as high up the Amazon ladder as one might expect, or even appear on the bookshelf in any prominent fashion. Sort of makes you wonder if Google has had a hand in this, not publicizing the book and not necessarily making it invisible either. I have argued more than once that Google wants to make all the world's information free to the public, except its own.

"The Google Story" seems to fly in the face of that argument, in a sense, as a great of information about the company is presented that you don't find anywhere else. The book is perhaps one of Google's best kept secrets that is open to the public.

So why haven't you read it yet?