Book Review: The Google Story

At my last job one of the first things the CEO said was that in order to work there I needed to immediately read The Google Story, of course two years later I finally read it, and I am sure glad I did.

The journey of how these Stanford graduates created an empire is both captivating and motivating. This is a great example of a simple idea that flourished into the most successful company of the decade. Throughout the book you learn secrets from behind the scenes of the whole process of how Google came to be.  The chapters take you alongside Larry and Sergey’s travels around the world as they expose their product to different countries.  And seeing the impact of how their free and thorough search capability has really changed the world as we know it.

I found it particularly interesting that while on their way to the top the founders were able to maintain their core values and their motto of “Don’t be evil”. This manifests in the fact that they do not want to make money or run ads that have to do with things that they don’t believe in, such as; drugs, sex trafficking etc.

While unleashing some of the mystery behind the inner workings of Google I was shocked to find out that they have a huge secret network of servers on the back end hosting all this information. Throughout the book there was a constant theme that they always needed to “order more servers” because the amount of information they were gaining access to was growing at the same speed as the company itself.

Reading a first hand account of this internet revolution was very insightful and a great read for anyone who has an idea and needs a little jump start. The internet is an amazing place and thanks to Google it is getting more profound every day. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone especially those in the online and tech fields.

Happy Reading!