PREFACE
The world has been Googled. We don’t search for
information, we “Google” it. Type a question in the Google search
box, as do more than 70 percent of all searchers worldwide, and in
about a half second answers appear. Want to find an episode of
Charlie Rose you missed, or a funny
video made by some guy of his three-year-old daughter’s brilliant
ninety-second synopsis of Star Wars: Episode
IV? Google’s YouTube, with ninety million unique visitors in
March 2009—two-thirds of all Web video traffic—has it. Want to
place an online ad? Google’s DoubleClick is the foremost digital
advertising services company. Google’s advertising revenues—more
than twenty billion dollars a year—account for 40 percent of all
the advertising dollars spent online. In turn, Google pumps ad
dollars into tens of thousands of Web sites, bringing both traffic
and commerce to them. Want to read a newspaper or magazine story
from anywhere in the world? Google News aggregates twenty-five
thousand news sites daily. Looking for an out-of-print book or a
scholarly journal? Google is seeking to make almost every book ever
published available in digitized form. Schools in impoverished
nations that are without textbooks can now retrieve knowledge for
free. “The Internet,” said Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian,
“makes information available. Google makes information
accessible.”
Google’s uncorporate
slogan—“Don’t be evil”—appeals to Americans who embrace underdogs
like Apple that stand up to giants like Microsoft. Google’s is one
of the world’s most trusted corporate brands. Among traditional
media companies—from newspapers and magazines to book publishers,
television, Hollywood studios, advertising agencies, telephone
companies, and Microsoft—no company inspires more awe, or more
fear.
There are sound
reasons for traditional media to fear Google. Today, Google’s
software initiatives encroach on every media industry, from
telephone to television to advertising to newspapers to magazines
to book publishers to Hollywood studios to digital companies like
Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, or eBay. For companies built on owning
and selling or distributing that information, Google can be
perceived as the new “Evil Empire.”
Google is run by
engineers, and engineers are people who ask why: Why must we do
things the way they’ve always been done? Why shouldn’t all the
books ever published be digitized? Why shouldn’t we be able to read
any newspaper or magazine online? Why can’t we watch television for
free on our computers? Why can’t we make copies of our music or
DVDs and share them with friends? Why can’t advertising be targeted
and sold without paying fat fees to the media middleman? Why can’t
we make phone calls more cheaply? Google’s leaders are not cold
businessmen; they are cold engineers. They are scientists, always
seeking new answers. They seek a construct, a formula, an algorithm
that both graphs and predicts behavior. They naively believe that
most mysteries, including the mysteries of human behavior, are
unlocked with data. Of course, Wall Street’s faith in such
mathematical models for derivatives helped cripple the American
economy.
Naivete and passion
make a potent mix; combine the two with power and you have an
extraordinary force, one that can effect great change for good or
for ill. Google fervently believes it has a mission. “Our goal is
to change the world,” Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, told me. Making
money, he continued, “is a technology to pay for it.”
I came away from two
and a half years of reporting on Google believing that its leaders
genuinely want to make the world a better place. But they are in
business to make money. Making money is not a dirty goal; nor is it
a philanthropic activity. Any company with Google’s power needs to
be scrutinized. I also came away impatient with companies that
spend too much time whining about Google and too little time
devising an offense. Most old media companies were inexcusably slow
to wake to the digital disruption.
In 2007, Eric Schmidt
told me that one day Google could become a hundred-billion-dollar
media company—more than twice the size of Time Warner, the Walt
Disney Company, or News Corporation, the world’s three largest
media conglomerates. That Google might achieve this goal in less
than a generation, in a time when copyright and privacy practices
are being upended, when newspapers are declaring bankruptcy and
in-depth journalism is endangered, when the profit margins of book
publishers are squeezed along with their commitment to serious
authors, when broadcast television networks dilute their
programming with less expensive reality shows and unscripted fare,
when cable news networks talk more than they listen, when the
definitions of community and privacy are being redefined, and the
way citizens read and process information is being altered, and
when most traditional media models are being reconfigured by
digital companies like Google—all this means that it’s important to
put Google under the microscope.
Brilliant engineers
are at the core of the success of a company like Google. Drill
down, as this book attempts to, and you’ll see that engineering is
a potent tool to deliver worthwhile efficiencies, and disruption as
well. Google takes seriously its motto, “Don’t be evil.” But
because we’re dealing with humans not algorithms, intent sometimes
matters less than effect. A company that questions everything and
believes in acting without asking for permission has succeeded like
few companies before. Unlike most technologies that disrupted
existing business—the printed book that replaced scrolls, the
telephone that replaced the telegraph, the automobile that replaced
the horse and buggy, the airplane that supplanted cruise ships, the
computer that supplanted typewriters—Google search produces not a
tangible product but something abstract: knowledge. This makes
Google both less and more vulnerable to challenge. Less because
Google’s prodigious Mount Everest of data is unrivaled. More
because Google depends for its continued success on users and
governments that trust it will not abuse this knowledge. Whether
one applauds or fears this eleven-year-old company, there is no
question that Google demands our attention.