The Google story

No one with an internet connection can have missed the spectacular rise of the Google search engine in the last few years. This book tells the story of this rise - how the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin came to top the list of young billionaires without it seems having a particular interest in making money. Thus we hear about how Google has challenged the established way of doing things in business, and the legal problems which they have faced as a result. The book is well written -no technical knowledge required - and is recommended for anyone who want to catch up with what has been happening in the computing world.

One thing that I hadn't realised was that Google make their own computers. It is recognised that the best way to get the most computing power for the least amount of money is to connect together a large number of cheaply built PC's. However this has its own problems and most organisations would go for fewer, larger computers. Google, whose business depends crucially on computing power, has faced and dealt with these problems. Maybe the idea of Google marketing 'Google PC's' isn't that unlikely. I would have prefered if this book had looked more at such ideas - what Google is likely to do in the future. It doesn't deal with the day to day running of the company (which wouldn't have been so interesting), but that means that 'Google watchers' will already know much of what it has to tell. I would have liked a bit more speculation.