The Google Guys-- Inside the brilliant minds of Larry and Sergey

Birth and death make up the circle of life. Just about a week before the globe mourned the passing away of tech god Steve Jobs, who changed the way millions viewed the world; another tech giant celebrated the completion of 13 years of its life. Last month, everyone’s favourite search engine Google turned a teenager. We all know the story of its birth — how Larry Page and Sergey Brin created the search engine, and how, due to the lack of any takers for their technology, it metamorphosed into a full-fledged company. The rest, as they say, is history. And Google keeps creating newer history every day. Of course, that’s what more people are interested in. And yet more people would, obviously, like to know more about the guys that go on creating that history.The Google Guys: Inside The Brilliant Minds Of Google Founders Larry Page And Sergey Brin by Richard Brandt definitely tempts you with its title, and it does, to some extent show you why the duo took some of the decisions they did and what is it that guides their decision-making process. The book begins with an interesting analogy: comparing Google with the world’s first great library — the library of Alexandria at Greece, created by Ptolemy I, a childhood friend of Alexander, and a general in his army. The analogy is continued in the beginning of every new chapter, referring to little bits in the creation of the giant.The interesting part is the exploration of Larry and Sergey’s origins and how they exert an influence in the way they operate their company — thinking more about the ‘ethics’ of things. In fact, the ethical angle has been emphasised a lot throughout the book, in bits and pieces. It has a lot to do with censorship and the founders’ aversion to it, the choices they had to make to deal with it and the scathing criticism from people who didn’t like that choice one bit. For instance, there’s a very interesting bit about how Nicole Wong, Google’s deputy general counsel, travelled all the way to Thailand to see for himself why Thai people found certain “unquestionably disrespectful” videos of their King to be offensive enough to be termed illegal.What he discovered was that in Thailand, the king was revered as a “cross between George Washington, Jesus Christ and Elvis Presley”. She finally decided that it was actually right to block the offending videos in Thailand. On the other hand, though, Google came under flak for refusing to censor an anti-Semitic site called JewWatch (incidentally, both Larry and Sergey are Jews). Sergey publicly defended the company’s anti-censorship stance.The book is full of such moral-dilemma episodes, aside from the usual tracing of the ups and downs of business. There’s the story about how the company’s ‘Don’t be Evil’ slogan came into being, and how, “it’s the bloggers that set out to prove… that Google is getting evil as it gets bigger”. The re-iteration of the ethical stance does go rather overboard at times. But the stories peppered around it make it worth the while.The bottom line, as the book underlines, is: Ptolemy’s library reigned as the greatest library in the world for 300 years; is that some mystic indication of how long Google is going to stretch its reign?