The Google Story

Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time

By: David A. Vise, Mark Malseed

Narrated by: Stephen Hoye

Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins

Publisher's summary

Here is the story behind one of the most remarkable Internet successes of our time. Based on scrupulous research and extraordinary access to Google, the book takes you inside the creation and growth of a company whose name is a favorite brand and a standard verb recognized around the world. Its stock is worth more than General Motors’ and Ford’s combined, its staff eats for free in a dining room that used to be run by the Grateful Dead’s former chef, and its employees traverse the firm’s colorful Silicon Valley campus on scooters and inline skates.

The Google Story is the definitive account of the populist media company powered by the world’s most advanced technology that in a few short years has revolutionized access to information about everything for everybody everywhere.

In 1998, Moscow-born Sergey Brin and Midwest-born Larry Page dropped out of graduate school at Stanford University to, in their own words, “change the world” through a search engine that would organize every bit of information on the Web for free.

While the company has done exactly that in more than 100 languages, Google’s quest continues as it seeks to add millions of library books, television broadcasts, and more to its searchable database. Listeners will learn about the amazing business acumen and computer wizardry that started the company on its astonishing course; the secret network of computers delivering lightning-fast search results; the unorthodox approach that has enabled it to challenge Microsoft’s dominance and shake up Wall Street.

Even as it rides high, Google wrestles with difficult choices that will enable it to continue expanding while sustaining the guiding vision of its founders’ mantra: DO NO EVIL.

©2005 David A. Vise (P)2005 Books on Tape, Inc.

Great Insight

The inside story of Google

Irritating

I purchased this book in order to get a detailed look at the ideas and practices that made Google the success it is today. While this information is present, it is so overwhelmed by the fawning and sycophantic praise of the company and its founders that I was completely distracted.

Within the first few minutes, the author has already dubbed the company founders as geniuses, in a class by themselves, and more worthy of praise than American inventors such as Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. And that's just a sample.

It makes it very difficult to trust any aspect of the book as objective.

Breathless Accolades?

The book often has interesting content, but way too many superlatives thrown around about Google and its founders. A bit more critical distance would have been appreciated. And the narrator's overly enthusiastic delivery tends to enforce the "best of breed", most creative, most this, most that, greatest this, greatest that view of the Google enterprise.

Read The Search instead

This book is a love note to Google by the authors. For a clearly-written, superior, unsentimental assessment of that company read John Battelle's The Search.

the google founders are not gods

this is one of the worst books I have ever downloaded from audible.the author sounds like a paid advertisement for google. Google has been a major success story, and has changed the way we use the web, but instead of a fact based review of the google and it's history this reads like a come to the alter of the google gods.

Free PR

Some of the material is interesting but it reads like a brochure put out by Google. The narration is good.