waider | reading material

One of the books I got for Christmas is "The Google Story" by David A. Vise; it touts itself as "the definitive account of one of the most remarkable organizations of our time". The best part of it is the historical stuff about Google's founding; it's not quite so good in its coverage of the GMail privacy arguments; the entirety of chapter 14 could be replaced with the phrase, "People use Google to look for porn" without any loss of information; and the most curious part of the whole thing is whether or not the author actually ever talked to Sergey, or Larry - or even Eric Schmidt. Certainly reading the book I had a strong impression that he'd conducted several interviews with them, and the phrasing of a lot of quoted material suggests that he was, indeed, conversing with them. However, the flyleaf contains the note that the book isn't "created, authorised, or endorsed by Google, Inc.", and the section on sources explains that they talked to a lot of people who knew Larry and Sergey - lecturers at Stanford and what not - and perhaps most tellingly, having thanked Larry and Sergey "for trusting us[1] to tell their story", it goes on to say, "we discussed the manuscript with Google Executives" (my emphasis) which strongly suggests that the only trust Larry and Sergey expressed was in not actively blocking the publication of the book.

[1] Mark Malseed gets a with credit on the inside of the book, but not on the cover.