Reference Reviews

Doug’s Student Reference Room

Google, by Virginia Scott. 153 pp. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-313-35127-3. $45.

Consider the lineage of a leading company’s two founders: the first man’s mother taught computer programming and the father was a computer science professor at Michigan State University. The second man’s mother is a NASA scientist and his father is a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland. Both founders attended Montessori schools as children and both attended Stanford, where their partnership began. These are a few of the many, many delicious details in a new biography of Google in Greenhaven’s Corporations That Changed the World series. This volume begins with brief sketches of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and a brief overview of the Google story, generating intrigue with details like those mentioned above. These introductory chapters are followed smartly by a history of Internet search. No explanation of Google’s success is complete without a discussion of the unique contribution Google made to search technology and the context provided helps explain the explosive popularity of this product. Subsequent chapters explore Google’s iconoclastic corporate culture, including its “Don’t Be Evil” code of conduct and its insistence that employees devote 20% of their work time to projects that capture their imaginations and are not directly related to their job description. Appendices include a bibliography and charts of financial performance; a general index also is included. Well-written and documented, this brief history is an outstanding resource for any reader interested in one of the most fascinating corporations of all time. Highly recommended for middle school, high school and public libraries.
—Doug Achterman