Just finished "I'm Feeling Lucky" by Douglas Edwards

And it's the book about Google i always wanted to read. Books like "In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives" and "What Would Google Do?" and the like is written by professional journalists/writes telling a story their target audience (you - the technophilia) wants to read. Douglas Edwards on the other hand just tells the story of an early google employe (his story) - and that's what i actually want to read (ok, he is not an engineer, "just" marketing - but good enough)

Here are some fun facts that i as an professional Google stalker (it's a living) found interesting:

the google toolbar green page rank bar is indeed just a bait to turn on the "advanced" features that communicate all your pageviews to google. that is nothing new, but it was a conscious decision when they developed their product.

marissa mayer seems to be ... hard to work with and she really thinks that everything she does, she does for the users.

there are/were different factions inside google on what to do with (i.e.: how long to store) user data.

google did not come this far because it's a nice company, as a matter of fact they hired the most ruthless negotiators they could find.

sergy rules.

if the founder were not overruled CPC adwords and adsense would not have happened.

the original pagerank algorithm was already faded out 2002/2003.

according to paul bucheit (creator gmail) orkut failed not because of bad technology, but because of 'tech snobbery' - yeah, the tec. behind orkut was bad, but if google would have decided to do "everything to make this thing work" then it would have worked - but as the engineers just deemed orkut "not scalable" and let the original rot and worked on a new version instead (and wasted precious time).

they really worry about bad PR.

it's a good book.