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Pan by David A. Vise Search David A. Vise
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Customer Reviews:
Covers the Business well, if not the Technical
I enjoyed this book and it gives a good account of the founding members, how they started the company, what it came from and all the major incidents the company has undergone since then, up to 2006 for my addition - no Crome or the PC operating system. The writing was easy to follow and set in a logical sequence.
Covers their interests, getting initial money for the company, how they started to generate money from the search engine, floating, legal problems and Microsoft. Their products are covered, the search engine, gmail, Google print (books) and much more including were it might go with biological/genetic research in the form of data mining.
What it doesn't do is give much away about the technical side of the company. Surprisingly the search works on a grid of custom built, or rather stripped down, PC's linked together the "google way". They run the Lunix operating system, customized of course, and that's about it from a technical perspective, bar numbers and distribution of computer rooms. Nothing about the techniques used or even if a programming language is used, so that was a bit disappointing for me. I would have thought they could find out a bit more, perhaps he couldn't print more.
One chapter explains the concerns some people expressed on how Google searches could be linked to gmail accounts. A fair bit of details was discussed on how Google reacted to this, who they talked too, but didn't really say what, if anything, was done.
The overall point of view is pretty positive on Google, problems are covered but not judged.
A great read with excellent coverage of how such a large company became so big so quickly. It missed out on five stars for the lack of technical content.
Good description of Google's rise
I picked this up when it was going cheap in Zavvi's sale. It's a good account of the rise of Google: how they recognized search as the most crucial component of the web and made their money by adding targeted advertising to their search results. I was somewhat disappointed at the paucity of technical detail beyond some journalistic hand-waving about a "seamless blend of hardware and software at ... a massive scale", and the fact that Google's servers are assembled from commodity PCs. This, it's somewhat breathlessly announced on page 2, is "perhaps Google's best-kept secret", which sounds rather self-contradictory. However, given the general audience that the book is written for (and the many details of their architecture that really *are* secret - even down to the number of servers they employ), perhaps this isn't too surprising - though I'm pretty sure that even a general reader wouldn't need to be told (p35) who Midas was.
There's also some degree of repetition across the chapters, which makes them read more like self-contained magazine articles instead of pieces of a coherent whole. But in general, I found this an entertaining read, and an interesting story about how Google has changed the world over the past couple of decades. On a personal note, I was also surprised to discover from this book that one of my (vanishingly tenuously linked) associates from the field of computer graphics in the early 90's had shared an office with Google's founders at Stanford. It's a small, joined-up world.
"We gotta zig cos they think we're gonna zag"
This book is written as a testament to Google and all they've achieved in the last decade. As someone of a slightly cynical nature I found myself viewing a lot of this book with a fair amount of scepticism. Are Google really this good? Did they really have such a clear vision from the start? Do they never do evil? However, in the end I found this book incredibly enlightening and inspiring.
The Google vision is a strong one that stands against conventional thinking and drives the company to produce a quality product and a creative culture. This shines through in both the book and also the products they create. I came to realise not just that I use many of their products on a daily basis but also understand why I find them so appealing and useful.
The book is well written, very comprehensive and very informative on the different aspects and characters of Google. I have learned many things while reading this book and it has challenged me in a number of ways to improve what I do. It has also left me galvanised in my belief that free thinkers can achieve massive success when they don't give in to the pressure to conform.
An inspiring read 
This is an inspiring read about two young Stanford Institute of Technology students who took on the world - and won. Through a stunning power of belief, they decided one day to download the whole Internet and to use thousands of computers to store the data and so build the quickest and most reliable search engine of its time. Sounds simple, doesn't it?
One of the chapters is called "A Healthy Disregard for the Impossible" and that just about sums up the attitude and philosophy of the google founders.
This book (both descriptive and analytical) should be read by those at corporate level and also those who are thinking of lighting the creative entrepreneurial spark that awaits inside them.
In fact, I would go as far as to say that this is actually bordering on being a self-help book, such is its power to motivate.
Boring, Boring, Boring! 
Sure this book gives you the facts where the author knows them but with Larry and Sergey well known for not often giving interviews or much away there really isnt much you couldnt find with a bit of good web research. The biggest disappointment is that book is written in such a boring and uninvolving way with zero entertainment value. Has to be one of the worst books I have ever read!
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