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Googled: The End of the World as We Know It

by Ken Auletta

Amherst, New York: Penguin Press, 2009

Just eleven years old, Google has transformed the way we live and work — changing how we access information and disrupting the way entire industries operate, from advertising and news to publishing, TV, and telephones. All have been Googled, as have corporations everywhere.

In Googled, esteemed media writer and critic Ken Auletta uses the story of Google’s rise to explore the inner workings of the company and the future of the media at large. Although Google has often been secretive, this book is based on the most extensive cooperation every granted a journalist, including access to closed-door meetings and interviews with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, CEO Eric Schmidt, and some 150 present and former employees.

Inside the Google campus, Auletta finds a culture driven by brilliant engineers in which even the most basic ways of doing things are questioned. His reporting shines light on how Google has been so hugely successful — and why it could slip. On one hand, Auletta reveals how the company has innovated, from Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Earth to YouTube, search, and other seminal programs. On the other, he charts its conflicts: the tension between massive growth and its mandate of “Don’t be evil”; the limitations of a belief that mathematical algorithms always provide correct answers; and the collisions of Google engineers who want more data with citizens worried about privacy. Google has become a dominant media player, and it aims to extend its reach even further. But can the company Page and Brin started in a garage stay innovative now that it is an international behemoth? Or will this seemingly indomitable company go the way of Xerox or GM?

More than a comprehensive study of media’s most powerful digital company, Googled is also a lesson in new media truths. It combines the distilled insights of industry legends such as Marc Andreesen, Mark Zuckerberg, and John Doerr with the experiences of a wide cross section of prominent traditional media executives. Pairing Auletta’s unmatched analysis with vivid details and rich anecdotes, it shows how the Google wave grew, how it threatens to drown media institutions once considered impregnable — and where it is now taking us all.

Ken Auletta has written the “Annals of Communications” column for The New Yorker since 1992. He is the author of eight books, including Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way; Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman; and World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies. In naming him America’s premier media critic, the Columbia Journalism Review said, “No other reporter has covered the new communications revolution as thoroughly as has Auletta.” He lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter.