Levy was first intro­duced to Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1999, when Google was just another Sil­i­con Val­ley start up, albeit one that was cre­at­ing a ton of indus­try buzz. Because of that early advan­tage, Levy was able to observe Google’s sub­se­quent stages of evo­lu­tion – from start up to search dom­i­nance, from an atmos­phere that seemed more of a reli­gious  “cause” than “com­pany”, from “don’t be evil” to “evil may be in the eye of the beholder.”

Given the inti­mate view­point afforded Levy, I couldn’t help com­ing away some­what dis­ap­pointed with the end result. Levy approached this as a jour­nal­ist and resists the temp­ta­tion to put Google’s story in a larger con­text. Bat­telle did a much bet­ter job of pin­point­ing Google’s place in the social fab­ric of our lives in his book. One could argue that they’re two dif­fer­ent books, with two dif­fer­ent objec­tives, but Levy’s sub­ti­tle, “How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives” seems to promise more. The book does a good job deliv­er­ing on the first two promises, but falls short on the third. Bat­telle man­aged to step back and give us a view of Google that, while admit­tedly awestruck, also inti­mated that we were on the cusp of a social change of immense impor­tance and that it may not all be pos­i­tive.  Bat­telle seemed much more com­fort­able with the big­ger pic­ture than does Levy, and the book suf­fers from this.

The first half of the book treads the same “Gee whiz, isn’t Google bril­liant!” path that is rapidly becom­ing weari­some. We gain some inside per­spec­tives from some early Google employ­ees, but there was noth­ing that really added to the Google canon here. I don’t dis­agree that Google was bril­liant, espe­cially in the early days, but that’s not par­tic­u­larly news to any­one at this point.

The book does begin to hit its stride in the sec­ond half when the shine wears off Google and it has to deal with the bumps and bruises it gains in deal­ing with a real world that didn’t always align with Google’s admit­tedly naïve view of how things should be. The unex­pected pri­vacy back­lash to Google’s attempt to mon­e­tize Gmail, the copy­right bat­tle sparked by Google Books and the entire Google China deba­cle all paint a pic­ture of a com­pany that seems to shoot itself in the foot just as often as it shoots for the stars.

Levy also hints at some inter­nal ten­sion between Google’s tri­umvi­rate of Page, Brin and Eric Schmidt, or “LSE” as Levy col­lec­tively refers to them. Page, in par­tic­u­lar, never seemed to fully over­come his resent­ment of the impo­si­tion of “adult super­vi­sion” forced upon Google in its for­ma­tive years by early VC investors. Due to the tim­ing of the book, we gain no insights into the behind-the-scenes story that lead to Schmidt’s replace­ment as CEO by Page late last year. It seems there’s much more to the story then what we cur­rently know, but you won’t be any the wiser for read­ing Levy’s book.

Through­out the book, I got the sense that just when things could become really inter­est­ing, Levy stepped back. As Bat­telle noted in his review, “I was a bit dis­ap­pointed with the book in that Steven didn’t take all that new knowl­edge and pull back to give us his own analy­sis of what it all meant. I asked him about this, and he said he made the con­scious deci­sion to not edi­to­ri­al­ize, but rather lay it all out there and let the reader draw his or her own conclusions.”

In my opin­ion, Levy’s deci­sion to not edi­to­ri­al­ize dimin­ishes the impor­tance of the book. If you chart the tone of Google through Levy’s reportage, there is a def­i­nite arc, from naïve bril­liance through world dom­i­nat­ing arro­gance and back down to shock and dis­be­lief that every­thing doesn’t always work out the way Google thinks it should. I can’t help think­ing that Google is at a crit­i­cal point in its evo­lu­tion, won­der­ing what it will become in the future. As Levy states, Google is cur­rently wrestling with “how it hopes to main­tain its soul.” Levy could have pro­vided unique insight into pos­si­ble answers to that ques­tion, but he chose instead to leave it up to us.


Biography / Resume : Gord Hotchkiss is the founder and senior vice president of Enquiro, now part of Mediative. He is renowned in the industry for his expertise when it comes to understanding online user and search behaviour. He and the Enquiro team have built a solid reputation for being the leading experts when it comes to understanding what happens on a search portal and why. Before Enquiro, Gord was chairman and director of SEMPO (The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), he worked as a columnist for MediaPost and Search Engine Land, and he was a regular speaker at industry conferences and events. Gord is also the author of The BuyerSphere Project: How Business Buys from Business in a digital marketplace.