Levy gives a good account how the young founders’ personalities, drive, intellect and highly mathematical skills coalesced converting a piece of insight into an application that would be used millions of times a day. In fact, according to comScore, there were 14.3 billion searches performed in March 2009 in the U.S alone.
The book gives a fascinating glimpse into how the search engine evolved, the tweaks, and the incorporation of hundreds of “signals” to ensure that google returned the most relevant search result. For example, Levy quotes one of the search engineers Amit Singhal working on synonyms “we discovered very early nifty things, people change words in their queries. So someone would say ‘pictures of dos’ and then they’ll say pictures of puppies’. That said that maybe dogs and puppies were interchangeable”.
He also goes on to say “we also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were learning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance”. But problems also emerged. Google’s synonym system came to understand that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But its engineers also discovered that the search engine considered that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy.
Levy provides us with Singhal’s account of how this was resolved. Singhal says, the breakthrough came in late 2002 that utilized Lugwig Wittegensteins theories on how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and web pages, it analysed which words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” – not “puppies with roasting fur”.
As key people joined Google, they bought with them expertise as well as beliefs which Levy goes to great length to describe their contribution and the manner they shape Google today. The book, as much as anything else explores Google's culture, history and technology and includes the Internet giant's troubled foray into China, and its intensifying rivalry with Facebook.
The inner workings of search and integration with advertising is extremely interesting chapter – describing the founders priority in providing the best search result independent from how much a firm has paid for key-word based ads.
Just when the reader thinks they know about all that has happened inside the Googleplex (the corporate headquarters Google, in Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California) Levy reveals that former CEO Eric Schmidt tried to get information about a political donation he had made scrubbed from Google's search engine.
Also, that Page and Brin had to be schooled by former Vice President Al Gore about proper behavior in China as Google prepared to do business there, and he describes Google's inability to understand the very different rules of doing business in China, firing a Chinese manager after she used her expense account to buy iPods as gifts for Chinese government officials - a typical business custom in China.
If there is anything that I would have liked to seen covered – that would be the impact Google has on everyday life, work and education. Perhaps that’s all for another day and another book.
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