In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

Ever since its inception, and in many cases even before it became incorporated, Google has been referred to mainly in the superlatives. The briskness with which it became the dominant player in online search, the sheer size of its operations and the infrastructure, the incredibly short time within which it became one of the largest companies in terms of market capitalization - all of these are the stuff of legends. It is unsurprising then that Google would attract a high level of media attention, and there are literally hundreds of articles written about it every day. (I know this because I just did a quick search for Google in Google News.) Over the years there has also been no shortage of books on Google. However, in terms of the depth and breadth of its research, as well as the amount of first-hand information that it provides, Steven Levy's "In The Plex" stands in a category of its own. In the minds of its founders and most of the early employees, Google is first and foremost a technology company. The business model of online advertising came about almost as an afterthought, and one continuously gets the sense that its purpose is to pay the bills so that Google geeks can have a free reign in pursuing their latest techie interest. This attitude is an integral part of Google's DNA, and any book that aims to provide the reader with a better sense of what Google is all about needs to get this point across. Unfortunately, there have been several books in recent years that were more concerned with all the intangible aspects of life in the age of Google and had almost completely missed this point. "In The Plex," I am happy to say, did not fall in that trap. Steven Levy comes across as an extremely competent and well-informed technology journalist who clearly relishes the opportunity to write about all the intricacies of Google's engineering prowess. In this respect as well, this is a quintessentially Google book. If Google were a person, this is probably what its autobiography would look like. Levy, who currently works for Wired magazine, literally embedded himself deep within Google and over the course of two years or so interviewed hundreds of Google employees. The result is a very comprehensive book on almost all aspects of Google's technology and business. The book is very informative, probably more so than all the other books on Google out there combined. Even some of the already widely familiar stories about Google's origins and early years have been given new details. The book is also remarkable in that it provides a lot of information on some very specific technical details and innovation that Google has accomplished over the years. Granted, much of it is many years, or even over a decade, old, but for the longest time Google has been extremely cagey about revealing any of that information to the wider audience. The fact that most of the information in this book has been obtained directly from Googlers, including the notoriously secretive founding duo, may signal that Google has come to the point where it has become confident in its own strength and comfortable with the idea that revealing certain information about itself will not jeopardize its business model. I relished the opportunity to find out more about some of the Google's early "magical" features and projects. For instance, even though I had been relying on it for years, I finally understand how Google's famous spell-checker works. The reader can also learn more about the early days of Google's book scanning technology, the development of its massive data centers, the rise and fall of Google video, and several other Google projects and initiatives that have been undertaken over the years. All the stories are to the point and are not laden with techie jargon. The part of the book that I liked the most was the one that dealt with Google's abortive efforts to gain a foothold in China. China's government is notorious for its online censorship and the very restrictive measures

I learned all kinds of new things about Google - did you know they think of themselves as an "Artificial Intelligence" company? Did you know their language translation algorithm continually "learns" how to translate by looking at millions of phrases in pages already on the web? Did you know Google is one of the largest server manufacturers in the planet - maybe the largest - and 100% of the production is for internal use. Google's servers (1 million + of them) are made out of cheap-o components that malfunction at a higher rate than most, yet the infrastructure as a whole keeps reliability and data durability super high via software techniques and by using private fiber optic cables to redundantly zip data around the planet to their 25+ data centers. On top of fun facts about the company, Steve Levy provides great insight into what drives Larry Page, Sergey Brin and many of the other smart engineers at Google. Some of the stories in the book describe events that are so recent (like how the China situation was handled) you feel like you really are getting the inside scoop.

A. Parts of it were very tedious, to me, but I'm glad I read it. I'm not a very technically savvy person, rather I'm a former psychology student, so I had much to learn. Levy helped fill some of the gaps in my knowledge of how Google, and the web itself, actually works. Q. What parts were tedious to you? A. Well, the chapter on Google's business in China, for one, though this may be the most important chapter for people with an interest in China, which I don't have. Also, at times, Levy seemed to be glorifying the people at Google. I mean, he rarely said a negative word about any of them, only maybe that Larry was "ambitious," that's as far as he would go. It was like, he didn't want to burn his sources, and thus seemed to arise a potential conflict of interest. This repeated exaltation of Google's "heroes" was tedious after a while. Q. So you feel he was a biased observer and writer? A. Sometimes, but to be fair, toward the end of the book, Levy did note that Google's rapid growth, as a corporation, in terms of employees and capitalization, had made it the "big boy" on the block. New start-ups, and older corporations, like book publishers, all feared Google. He notes that some of Google's actions would lead to questions about their motto: "Do no evil." Nonetheless, the book is based largely on insider interviews he had with the Google principals, and these were granted, most likely, because the informants did not expect Levy to reveal much bad about them. Q. So what did you learn? A. I learned about "cloud computing," such as Google's Document service; about their largely ineffective forays into web television and social networking (Orkut); about precisely how Google Print started, with Larry taking digital photos of books held up page by page; about Android, which I knew nothing about but the name; and quite a bit more. Q. So the book is worth reading, even though you found it tedious in parts? A. Yes, I would say so. Levy was able to get his mitts around what seemed like the whole of a large corporation and give a sense of its many facets. This makes the book somewhat unique, but he does cite other authors on Google in his end notes. The documentation at the end is detailed and the book includes an index for specific reading.