In November 2005, David A Vise wrote “What Lurks in Its Soul?” for The Washington Post. Google doesn't need all that computer power to help us search for the best Italian restaurant in Northern Virginia. It has grander plans. The company is quietly working with maverick biologist Craig Venter and others on groundbreaking genetic and biological research. Google's immense capacity and turbo-charged search technology, it turns out, appears to be an ideal match for the large amount of data contained in the human genome. Venter and others say that the search engine has the ability to deal with so many variables at once that its use could lead to the discovery of new medicines or cures for diseases. Sergey Brin says searching all of the world's information includes examining the genetic makeup of our own bodies, and he foresees a day when each of us will be able to learn more about our own predisposition for various illnesses, allergies and other important biological predictors by comparing our personal genetic code with the human genome, a process known as "Googling Your Genes."
“Soon after moving into their new offices in Palo Alto, Google expanded to eight employees and struggled to keep up with the growing number of daily searches. Its unique system of computing, which adapted cheap PC parts and custom software into a small supercomputer, gave it the power to handle a rising number of search requests and ever larger downloads of the Web.”
- David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, authors of the book: The Google Story
“We have been wrong on lots of occasions. It was the quality of the service that Google provided that was demonstrably better than you could get anywhere else. That is why we invested. And as the Internet developed, we thought search would be more important, not less important.”
- Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital
The Googleplex
In November 2005, Janet Maslin wrote “Sorting the World by Design” for The New York Times. "The Google Story," by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, describes the lava lamps, AstroTurf, beach volleyball, celebrity-caliber fried chicken and touch-pad-controlled toilets that have given Google's cloistered Googleplex campus in Mountain View, Calif., its much-vaunted Peter Pan atmosphere. On a different note, "The Google Story" also includes an aerial view of the Googleplex taken from a B-24 bomber, with a machine gun visible in the foreground. Sunny or sinister? Either is a way to describe Google's fast, unstoppable rise from humble academic beginnings at Stanford University to (in the words of the author of "The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture," John Battelle) "holding the world by the thoughts."
“Moritz had first met Brin and Page through Yahoo’s David Filo back when they were stil students at Stanford. Moritz and his firm, Sequoia Capital, and backed Yahoo with $2 million and reaped a big gain from Yahoo’s $32 million IPO in 1996. Around that same time, Brin and Page were gathering information about starting a company, including valuation methods and other techniques, so they could work out an agreement with Stanford that would facilitate the patenting of PageRank and enable them to license it from the school.”
- David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, authors of the book: The Google Story
“With tech-savvy early investors such as Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos to provide them with advice, Brin and Page decided to reach out simultaneously to two of the most established and prestigious venture capital firms in Silicon Valley: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Sequoia Capital. If Things went well, their goal was to get both firms to pump cash into Google while leaving neither in charge of the company.”
- David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, authors of the book: The Google Story
In January 2006, John Lanchester wrote “Engine trouble” for The Guardian. Google is the only multi-billion-dollar company in the world that is also a spelling mistake. Back in the palaeolithic era (that's the palaeolithic era in the internet sense, i.e. autumn 1997), its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were graduate computer science students at Stanford. They were working on an insanely cool new search engine, wanted to incorporate it as a company, and needed to find a name. David Vise, in his breezy book The Google Story, tells how they came up with one. A fellow graduate student suggested to Page and Brin that they use the name given to what is sometimes, erroneously or metaphorically, called the largest number, 10100: google. They looked up the name on the internet, found that it wasn't taken, and registered their brand-new brand, google.com. The next morning they found that the reason the name hadn't been taken was because it should be spelled googol - and that googol.com had, of course, already been bagged. Lesser men might have considered that a bad omen, but Page and Brin are not bad-omen kind of guys. A little more than eight years later, Google is the fastest-growing company in the history of the world - with, at the time of writing, a market capitalisation of $129bn. Page and Brin, the Wallace and Gromit of the information age, are worth more than $10bn each.
“Brin and Page were persuaded that they had found the path toward a Ph.D. thesis by applying PageRank to the Internet. By early 1997, Page had developed a primitive search engine that he named BackRub because it dealt with the incoming—or “back”—links to Web pages. Ever thrifty, Page put his left hand on a scanner, converted the image to black and white, and the new BackRub site had its logo. Page, Brin, and Motwani all contributed ideas to the evolving project. Motwani said that it would soon become clear that what they had created together was more than just a way to further their academic research. Without intending to, the trio had devised a ranking system for the Internet.”
- David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, authors of the book: The Google Story
"Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains" is a magazine article technology author Nicholas Carr. The article—or rather, the essay—was highly critical of the Internet's effect on cognition. The essay was published in the July, August 2008 issue of The Atlantic magazine, as a six-page cover story. The essay builds upon Carr's book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (in particular, it builds upon The Big Switch’s last chapter, "iGod". Nicholas Carr’s main argument in The Atlantic essay is that the Internet might have detrimental effects on cognition, i.e. the internet diminishes the capacity for concentration and contemplation. Despite the title, the article is not singling out Google, but is more a critique of the technological utopianism, surrounded by the fervor of the latest and greatest technological fad, be that Web 2.0 technologies, social media, etc. Nicholas Carr builds on these threads further, in his latest book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, published in June 2010.
“You want access to as much information as possible so you can discern what is most relevant and correct. The solution isn’t to limit the information you receive. Ultimately you have to have the entire world’s knowledge connected directly to your mind.”
- Google co-founder, Sergey Brin; in a 2004 interview with Playboy Magazine
"I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. My brain wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it."
The Effects of the Internet and Its Technologies on Reading Behaviors: Nicholas Carr asserts that using the Internet can lead to a lower attention span, and can make it more difficult to read in the traditional sense (that is, read a book at length without mental interruptions). Nicholas Carr says that he and his friends have found it more difficult to concentrate and read whole books, even though they read a great deal when they were younger (that is, when they did not have access to the Internet). Researchers from the University College London have done a 5-year study on Internet habits, and have found that people using websites on a regular basis exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited.
"It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense."
- University College London, School of Life and Medical Sciences
"But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become "pancake people"—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button."
- Richard Foreman, March 2005
In June 2010, Jonah Lehrer wrote “Our Cluttered Minds” for The New York Times. While Nicholas Carr tries to ground his argument in the details of modern neuroscience, his most powerful points have nothing do with our plastic cortex. Instead, “The Shallows” is most successful when Nicholas Carr sticks to cultural criticism, as he documents the losses that accompany the arrival of new technologies. The rise of the written text led to the decline of oral poetry; the invention of movable type wiped out the market for illuminated manuscripts; the television show obliterated the radio play (if hardly radio itself). Similarly, numerous surveys suggest that the Internet has diminished our interest in reading books. Carr quotes Wallace Stevens’s poem “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” in which stillness allows the reader to “become a book.” The incessant noise of the Internet, Nicholas concludes, has turned the difficult text into an obsolete relic.
"In the choices we have made, consciously or not, about how we use our computers, we have rejected the intellectual tradition of solitary, single-minded concentration, the ethic that the book bestowed on us."
"Thought will spread across the world with the rapidity of light, instantly conceived, instantly written, instantly understood. It will blanket the earth from one pole to the other — sudden, instantaneous, burning with the fervor of the soul from which it burst forth. This will be the reign of the human word in all its plenitude. Thought will not have time to ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book — the book will arrive too late. The only book possible from today is a newspaper."
- French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine, 1831, on the proliferation of the burgeoning medium of the day, the newspaper
In September 2010, Steven Poole criticized the Nicholas Carr book, The Shallows: Like the majority of contemporary books, then, The Shallows does not justify its length: its natural form was always that of a pithy provocation, so as an argument for the superiority of book-length prose it is rather self-defeating. Sometimes, however, it does seem as though the author's memory really has been degraded by his internet abuse. "It's possible to think deeply while surfing the net," Carr admits on page 116, thus momentarily torpedoing the determinism on which his jeremiad is predicated, before he gets back on message a mere three pages later, accusing the net of "preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively". Well, both cannot be true. Either you can think deeply when using the internet, or the internet prevents you from doing so. It is easy to see which version is correct; and which version, conversely, makes for a more polemically enticing sales pitch. All too rarely do defenders of books (and, for that matter, newspapers) ask themselves the uncomfortable question: might it be that people are reading fewer of the products not because people are becoming more stupid but because many of the products are not actually very good?
"In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably into the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life."
In July 2008, Clay Shirky, digital-media scholar at New York University, wrote “Why Abundance is Good: a Reply to Nick Carr.” Despite the sweep of the title, it’s focused on a very particular kind of reading, literary reading, as a metonym for a whole way of life. You can see this in Carr’s polling of “literary types,” in his quoting of Wolf and the playwright Richard Foreman, and in the reference to War and Peace, the only work mentioned by name. Now War and Peace isn’t just any piece of writing, of course; it is one of the longest novels in the canon, and symbolizes the height of literary ambition and of readerly devotion. But here’s the thing: it’s not just Carr’s friend, and it’s not just because of the web—no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting. This observation is no less sacrilegious for being true. The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy’s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it, but that process started long before the internet became mainstream. Much of the current concern about the internet, in fact, is a misdirected complaint about television, which displaced books as the essential medium by the 1970s.
ABC News recently invoked the author and his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Looming Tower, in this report on Wikileaks: Lawrence Wright is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Looming Tower," an investigation of the rise of Al-Qaida and the events leading to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He relied in part on internal State Department documents, the kind WikiLeaks has just released by the hundreds of thousands. "That was really helpful. I'd hate not to have such inside glimpses," Wright says of the documents he obtained, including how the State Department dealt with the Taliban in Afghanistan. He sees the short-term advantage to WikiLeaks, but wonders if books such as his will become harder to write. "I worry that there will be a backlash in terms of classification, so that more information that would be considered merely confidential will be termed top secret and kept from wider distribution, so that people on the ground who could put such knowledge to work, won't have access to it."See that ABC News report here.
In 2009, the author wrote this in the New Yorker: McAllen has another distinction, too: it is one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. Only Miami—which has much higher labor and living costs—spends more per person on health care. In 2006, Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars. In other words, Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns.See that New Yorker piece here. In the video below, the author's giving a talk that involves the topics and subjects of his book, at large, at Google's corporate campus (part of the company's "Authors @Google" series). The second video is of an interview of the author by Charlie Rose.
Verizon's launching its LTE network on Sunday, the FCC is proposing a plan for Net neutrality tomorrow, and Google is about to take over the world EVEN MORE with its e-book venture (we're sure the EU is going to love that). Also, that deafening silence you hear on Twitter is the sound of a bunch of celebrities playing dead to raise money for AIDS. New meme: celebrity zombie impersonator accounts! Get yours today! --Molly
Here he was, for an hour, talking up and getting absolutely electric about technology and the future for Google and the United States, but as he saw the hour closing in on the two, Schmidt, the brilliant manager, politician, and salesman (ultimately) that he is, ended with some corny notion of "deeper reading." He alluded to, at the end of the day, that, in spite of Instant Search (something Google's just come out with the other week), Schmidt waxed Romantic over how pleasurable and thoroughly satisfying a good old fashion book is. Yeah, right. Schmidt wrote the forward to The Startup Game, and in doing so, practically endorsed the thing. Charlie Rose was just another of Google's tour, the objective of which is to maintain appearances about things with the U.S. (You might've caught him on Colbert the other week.) Watch the full interview here. Or download and buy it here: Charlie Rose - Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google (March 6, 2009)
771 September 21 None Mark Shriver, Eric Schmidt "All your favorite shows are back this week. But remember, I'm the only one who never left you. This is The Colbert Report." 6119
," by David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, describes the lava lamps, AstroTurf, beach volleyball, celebrity-caliber fried chicken and touch-pad-controlled toilets that have given Google's cloistered Googleplex campus in Mountain View, Calif., its much-vaunted Peter Pan atmosphere. On a different note, "The Google Story
," John Battelle) "holding the world by the thoughts."
(in particular, it builds upon The Big Switch’s last chapter, "iGod". Nicholas Carr’s main argument in The Atlantic essay is that the Internet might have detrimental effects on cognition, i.e. the internet diminishes the capacity for concentration and contemplation. Despite the title, the article is not singling out Google, but is more a critique of the technological utopianism, surrounded by the fervor of the latest and greatest technological fad, be that Web 2.0 technologies, social media, etc. Nicholas Carr builds on these threads further, in his latest book, 
, published in June 2010.
, 