Caleb

The book “Google It” by Anna Crownley Redding is about the real life story about the big journey of a small start up to a world wide search engine and company that is used around the world. That company was quite obviously named Google. Throughout the story e can see Larry and Sergey go from indecisive roommates to successful businessmen. Along the way, it can seen that Larry and Sergey stuck to their core beliefs even though they would have to take a longer road to achieve.

An extremely visible central idea that kept showing up was that the users preference was always right. Somewhat like the customer is always right in some stores. Throughout the story, there are multiple clear instances that Google did not believe in mindlessly pressing ads because that was against the users interest. Larry and Sergey knew this because they were users of Excite and Yahoo. They said that they hated banner ads with a passion and understood how bad it looks for the eyes.

After reading a bit further and summarizing what I read, I read about the profit that google was making 0 dollars and 0 cents. Google made no money because they didn’t to press ads. Eventually it became a problem because the google server needed a lot of money to run. They hired a man named Eric Schmidt. Eric Schmidt helped them make money by buying start up companies like Adsense and invested in research for programs that sort ads that are most relevant for the users. Something I noticed was that at first they all argued with each other. Larry and Sergey argued when they first met and Larry, Sergey and Eric argued when they first met but after getting over the initial problems, they strongly benefit each other and Google.

A theme that links back to the central idea is to not chase money and focus on making your work better. This is quite obvious because throughout the book, google constantly buys or invests in research that can benefit its users and benefit the company then think about the profits that they want. They also are known to withdraw from things that contradict with their mission statement such as their relationship with China. The Chinese marketplace was vast and full of opportunity that would provide a lot of profit. Although China had a vast market, China wanted Google to self censor “offensive” topics on the Chinese version. Google refused but launched Google in China anyway. I was a bit confused on why but as I read on, the book revealed that Google was not self censoring but it was the Chinese government who censored it today. I was still confused because as you know currently Google is not available in China. I found out that Google actually realized that Google in China was never going to work out so when Chinese human rights activists were getting hacked and the hackers were traced backed to China, Google cut ties with China and withdrew.

Thank you for reading all of my post and more importantly, if you are interested in reading Google It, I suggest you click on this link to inquire more about the book and possibly the author too.