Just finished reading The Google Story and thought I’d write a review. The Google Story written by David A. Vise is another one of my charity shop finds.
The book does what it’s title says and takes you through the life of Google from conception to now, and the kinds of challenges popular growing services and companies face.
The main thing I got out of reading the book (and seemed to be a theme running through the book) was yet another confirmation of how a focus on solving a problem for people is such an important factor in success; and how solely focusing on making money will lead eventually to failure. You realise that Larry and Sergey were not interested in making money they just wanted to solve a problem and do it in a way that no-one else was doing; provide the best returns for a given search criteria. Google’s competitors had money as their focus but with Google’s resistance to advertising (certainly in the early days) they won users favour; when users want to search for something all they want is a page with a search bar and a button to press, not heaps of advertising and flashing text or graphics. Even now when adverts are part of the Google search returns, you can see they don’t clutter the page.
I’ve used Google for many years and recently I’ve use Easysearch to help raise funds for my local astronomy group (if you’d like to help raise funds too, then go to http://masas.easysearch.org.uk/ and set them as your homepage; or select other good causes to support) and you can see a big difference in the search results you get back. I think Google is better and although I’ve not done many recent comparisons between Google and other popular search engines Google is just better. I think one of the reasons for this is that the Google founders spent more time developing the search engine as opposed to concentrating on money making.
The book starts out describing the beginnings of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and how they came to meet. It then goes on to tell the story of how they got their first investments with out a real business plan for how returns on those investments were going to be made; again returns on search criteria were more important than returns on investments. The book then takes you through the rest of the history of Google to present day and finishes with a few pointers of where Google is headed in the years to come.
The book is one person’s account of the Google story and was not created, authorised, or endorsed by Google, Inc. and because of this a sceptical mind like mine is always going to wonder if some of this is propaganda. But you can’t deny the fundamental fact that when you win the hears and minds of your customers, by fighting your customers cause with them, by providing the service they need in the way that solves their problem, you’ll win their support and in turn win their business.
I found it a smooth balanced read; it doesn’t go too deep into the technical or the business side of things. Think you could work for Google? Then have a go at their aptitude test in the Appendix section of the book and let me know how you get on.
You can buy this book from Amazon
Have you read The Google Story? If so, what did you think? Do you agree with my thoughts? Let me know by leaving me a comment.
Until the next post…
