Google's Vulcan death grip

Is Google the Mr. Spock of the Internet -- all head, no heart? A new book wonders if the very things that made the company great will bring it down.

By Scott Rosenberg

Read more: Books, Google, Internet, Technology & Business, Microsoft, Scott Rosenberg, World Wide Web, Reviews, Book reviews

Oct. 9, 2008 | Google's reliable presence is woven so tightly into our daily experience of the Web that its infrequent failures feel like seismic events. What? Some Google service doesn't respond? Has there been a rupture in the space-time continuum?

Thankfully, Google downtimes are brief, and so rare that bloggers take screen-captures of the events and post them like souvenirs. But when they do happen, they offer us brief flashbacks to something that now seems unthinkable -- a Google-less Web.

In fact, of course, we lived for years online without any Google at all. In 1998 Google was actually a latecomer, an upstart on a Web that had already grown crowded with services that promised to guide you through the online jungle. Conventional wisdom had it that Web search had fully evolved: The technology was as advanced as it could be; the market was boring and mature; opportunity lay elsewhere. Hah!

I first stumbled on Google almost exactly a decade ago, in autumn of 1998, and it changed my work life. I itched to tell my readers what I'd found: Google was fast. It gave better search results than any of its better-established competition. But, most important of all, it was -- as T.E. Lawrence says of the desert in "Lawrence of Arabia" -- clean. Its Zen-like starting page, then as now, consisted of little more than an empty search box. Stratospheric dot-com bubble market valuations had pushed a multitude of "portals" to overload their home pages with theoretically cash-generating distractions; in such an environment, Google's willingness to stay focused was both a relief and a revelation.

Google's ascent ever since has been breathtaking -- first as a delightfully usable tool for everyday Web users, then as a money machine profiting from an effective new model of unobtrusive online advertising, and finally today as a dominant industry force promoting a new computing paradigm centered on the Web rather than the desktop personal computer.

Google has covered a lot of ground in a decade. But the company's ambition, as encapsulated in its famous mission statement, reaches way farther. Google's goal -- "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" -- has taken it far afield from the simple search box, into e-mail and word processing services, video sharing and book scanning, global satellite imaging and social networking software.

The story of these efforts, Google's early stabs at making good on its lofty mission, is the focus of Randall Stross' new "Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know." Stross, author of books about Microsoft and the venture capital business and a columnist for the Sunday New York Times business section, wisely avoids retreading too much of the basic Google saga already well chronicled by John Battelle in "The Search" (and likely to be covered again by the estimable Steven Levy in his next book, too). Instead, Stross fills in the blank spots on our map of Google's story, assembling a panorama of the company's fitful struggle to expand its search franchise into other realms.

These turn out, surprisingly, to be more haphazard and opportunistic than calculated and planned. Google is, famously, a company built by computer scientists and engineers who value precision and good data. The search engine itself operates largely untouched by direct human intervention; coders tune the algorithm but don't mess with the results. The "algorithms uber alles" approach turned out to be ideal both for Web search and for the text-ad business Google built on top of search. But as the company began moving farther out into the world beyond the server farm, it often found itself stymied by messy human considerations beyond most algorithms' grasp.

Stross provides particularly vivid accounts of several Google train wrecks. There was its troubled foray into digitizing books by the library-ful, which ran headlong into publishing industry fears about losing control of copyrighted assets. Its misbegotten plan to build a Web video service focused on carefully vetted professional content failed spectacularly, leading to the company's $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube in 2006. Then there was the difficulty Google faced in persuading users of its Gmail service that machine-scanning their e-mail messages in order to display relevant advertisements didn't constitute snooping on their personal correspondence.

In each of these stories, Stross presents a different Google from the one we think we know. As a search provider, Google is confident, competent and a master of "scale" -- the ability to keep its results flowing speedily and accurately even as demand skyrockets. But as the company tries to branch out, it miscalculates, makes beginner's mistakes, and fumbles seemingly obvious maneuvers -- like, if you're planning to digitize the contents of the world's books, perhaps some conversations with the companies that publish them might be in order?

Next page: What can trip up Google?