Name: The Google story
ISBN: 9780385342735

The Google story

"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 berunby 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 one hundred languages, Google's quest continues as it seeks to add millions of library books, television broadcasts, and more to its searchable database.

What Hacker News says

nostrademonsJun 2007

I actually don't read any of the above unless linked from another source - too much noise, not enough signal.

I read Programming Reddit, News.YC, and occasionally Startupping and LambdaTheUltimate. I try to keep up with some blogs of startup-type people - Dharmesh Shah, Joe Kraus, Raganwald, Paul Buchheit, Mark Fletcher, and Marc Andreesen and Wil Schroter look interesting based on their recently-linked news.YC articles.

Also, don't underestimate the importance of good old fashioned dead-tree books. I know it's fashionable to spend all day online now, but I still find I get lots more information out of published works than the Internet (the net is great for pointers to books, though). I read a lot of history, economics, corporate histories, some biographies, theoretical computer science, etc. Some selected titles off my reading history (my library's software keeps track of books I've checked out):

"Founders at Work" (Jessica Livingston), "The Rockefeller Billions" (Jules Abels), "Stocks for the Long Run" (Jeremy Siegel), "The Intelligent Investor" (Benjamin Graham), "When Genius Failed" (Roger Lowenstein), "One Up on Wall Street" (Peter Lynch), "Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes" (Gary Belsky and Thomas Gilovich), "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money" (John Maynard Keynes), "The Google Story" (David A. Vise), "When the Astors Owned New York" (Justin Kaplan), "Art of the Start" and "Rules for Revolutionaries" (Guy Kawasaki), "Purple Cow" and "Big Red Fez" and "All Marketers are Liars" (Seth Godin), "Microsoft Secrets" (Michael Cusumano), "Damn Right: Behind the scenes with Charlie Munger" (Janet Lowe), "Crossing the Chasm" (Geoffrey Moore), "A Good Hard Kick in the Pants" (Rob Adams), "Innovation and Entrepreneurship" and "The Essential Drucker" (Peter Drucker), "Only the Paranoid Survive" (Andy Grove), "dot.bomb: My days and nights at an Internet goliath" (J. David Kuo), "Accidental Empires" (Robery X. Cringely), "The Microsoft Way" (Randall Stross), "High St@kes, No Prisoners" (Charles Ferguson), "The Making of Microsoft" (Daniel Ichbiah and Susan L. Knepper), "AlmostPerfect: How a bunch of regular guys built WordPerfect Corporation" (W.E. Pete Peterson), "Direct from Dell" (Michael Dell), "Inside Intel" (Tim Jackson), "The Innovator's Dilemma" and "The Innovator's Solution" (Clayton Christianson), "Good to Great" and "Built to Last" (Jim Collins), and "Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh" and "Hackers" by Steven Levy.

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jamaicahestApr 2010

Seems like a chapter out of http://www.amazon.com/Google-Story-Googles-10th-Birthday/dp/...

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ndsatyaMay 2008

Paul,

As always it is a very thoughtful and incisive article. However, I have certain reservations on Google trying to sell out, especially after I read The Google Story by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed.

I believe for young people (especially tech students), the idea is not to make a lot of money. It is more of a passion, a will to change the world. Yes, they may have failed as well. I may not say the same for people who are in the industry for long or MBA types.

Also at the same time it is a bit of luck, destiny or hand of God. More @ http://satya-dash.blogspot.com/2008/05/why-we-do-not-see-mor...

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