Nonfiction Book Reviews

I saw Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know by Randall Stross one day while doing check-in.  Since I am a big fan of Google (I use Gmail for my email service - Gmail ROCKS! - and faithfully use only Google to search the internet) I thought it would be interesting to learn more about this company that has played such a large role in my online life.

Overall, Planet Google was interesting.  It didn’t quite progress the way I thought it would - I thought it would start at the beginning, with the history of the co-founders, and then progressing linearly through time up to the point of publication.

Instead, it had very little personal history about the co-founders (Larry Page and Sergey Brin) and instead of progressing forward through time, the book was organized around ideas that Google has experimented with, from Google Earth to Gmail to YouTube.  Each chapter focused on an idea, or focused on the competition Google has faced from Microsoft and Yahoo.

It made for a very quick read (I sat down after work tonight and finished the whole book in one sitting - about 2.5 hours or so) and I think that reading it so quickly made me realize something that would have otherwise been lost reading it over the course of a week or a month: Randal Stross repeated himself several times throughout the book, almost as if he had written each section separately, and then at the end combined it all into one book.

There were a couple of instances where he would explain a concept in-depth in one chapter, and then explain that same concept again a chapter or two later (in much less detail, but still, there was more explanation the second time around than was needed, for sure.)  If I had taken 6 weeks to read the book, I never would have noticed this.

Despite these shortcomings, I enjoyed it, and I feel like I have a better understanding of the fundamentals of Google than I did before I read it.  I use Facebook regularly, so I was really surprised to learn about the rivalry between Facebook and Google.  I had no clue before I read Planet Google.  Nor did I know that Microsoft has some monetary stake in Facebook, or that Microsoft and Google are rivals (I don’t pay much attention to rivalry between tech companies, what can I say?)

But while there were events or happenings that the author covered in great detail (like YouTube, and more specifically, making YouTube monetarily solvent) there were other Google-related items that the book did not touch on at all, or only mentioned once or twice in passing, like Blogspot and Google AdSense.  Those are both huge parts to the Google world, and yet they garnered zero attention by Stross.

I think that is one of the book’s biggest downfalls - it tended to be fairly superficial.  I feel like he skimmed through a lot, but then repeated other things (how is YouTube going to make money?) too much.

There were events that the author referred to as being a “huge deal” and I had no clue they had even happened, let alone was affected by it happening.  I think there has been more than one technology bubble - for someone wrapped up in the Google world, perhaps these things were a huge deal, but to the rest of us, it was negligible at best.

Planet Google would obviously would not appeal to someone not interested in the tech world - this is not a book I could recommend to just anyone in off the street.  But for the right person, I think this would make for a fascinating read.  Since I fall into that group of people interested in both technology and the story behind the companies that shape our world today (I really need to read a book about Microsoft!) I give it 4.25 stars out of 5.

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