Book Review: “The Google Story”

I keep a book report journal for my personal use as a way to keep track of books I’ve read. At times I’ll find that I’ll finish a book and have no recollection of it or its more salient points; that journal keeps such memory lapses in check.

In light of that, I’ll also post some reviews here, especially since quite a few of the tomes I plow through are business-related (even a few that aren’t are worth commenting on here).

The first entry (and an abridged one): The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media and Technology Success of Our Time. It was a cute book. But it suffers from second-child syndrome to John Battelle’s The Search, which not only presented Google’s story, but offered the story of the industry and a better sense of where it’s going.

Google’s story is a good one, and it’s a quick read, as told by David Vise, yet it feels like the People magazine version, where Battelle’s is the BusinessWeek take. For someone purely interested in Google from a human interest perspective, the person who loved the Google segment on 60 Minutes but wouldn’t bother picking up a copy of Forbes, then all you need is the Vise tome. If you want something bigger, a book that’s actually worth expensing to your company, stick with Battelle.