If Google were a sitcom, it would open every week with co-founder Sergey Brin arriving late to a meeting “out of breath in a T-shirt, gym shorts, and on Rollerblades.” This familiar depiction of Brin finds its way into practically every major profile ever written about the company, and so too does it dutifully roll into Ken Auletta’s newest book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It.

The first scene is a 2003 meeting with Mel Karmazin (then CEO of Viacom) at the Google campus with a sweaty Brin, Google’s other co-founder Larry Page, and CEO Eric Schmidt. At the end of his visit, Karmazin tells them he is appalled that Google is “fucking with the magic” of the media business by actually telling advertisers which ads work and which ones don’t. ... (Read the full review)

The New Yorker's "Annals of Communication" columnist Auletta (Media Man: Ted Turner's Improbably Empire, 2004, etc.) goes behind the digital revolution to detail the past decade of astonishing growth at Google. The greatest fear of Microsoft's Bill Gates—"someone in a garage who is devising something completely new"—was realized in Stanford graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who parlayed their breakthrough search engine into an all-purpose threat to newspapers, books, television, movies, phones, advertising and even Microsoft. Page and Brin believe that their enlightened business practice of putting end users first reflects the firm's motto, "Don't be evil." Their tendency as engineers—to dismiss what cannot be objectively measured—has helped them undercut traditional advertising firms incapable of pinpointing the effectiveness of campaigns. It has also left them sometimes so hilariously deficient in emotional intelligence that, Auletta writes, they "naively believe that most mysteries, including the mysteries of human behavior, are unlocked with data." CEO Eric Schmidt has balanced their desire to move nimbly against the larger world's fears about privacy, copyright and antitrust issues. In a high-tech, high-wire act, Google has combined in-house initiatives and daring acquisitions, producing one innovation after another and aiming to become a $100 billion media company (more than twice the size of Time Warner, the Walt Disney Co. or News Corp.)—and battling legal moves from alarmed old-media rivals. While praising its innovations, Auletta criticizes the company for not living up to its ideals in, for instance, China, where it agreed to censor sites to assure access in the authoritarian-controlled nation. Though not a vivid stylist, Auletta uncovers some endlessly colorful material and assesses its prospects critically but fairly—Google will thrive, he thinks, but they'd better guard against naivete and complacency.

Two Googles emerge in this savvy profile of the Internet search octopus. The first is the actual company, with its mixture of business acumen and naïve idealism (“Don't Be Evil” is the corporate slogan); its brilliant engineering feats and grad-students-at-play company culture; its geek founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two billionaires who imbibe their antiestablishment rectitude straight from Burning Man; its pseudo-altruistic quest to offer all the world's information for free while selling all the world's advertising at a hefty profit. The second Google is a monstrous metaphor for all the creative destruction that the Internet has wrought on the crumbling titans of old media, who find themselves desperately wondering how they will make money off of news, music, video and books now that people can Google up all these things without paying a dime. The first Google makes for a standard-issue tech-industry grunge-to-riches business story, its main entertainment value being Brin's and Page's comical lack of social graces. But New Yorker columnist Auletta (World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies) makes the second Google a starting point for a sharp and probing analysis of the apocalyptic upheavals in the media and entertainment industries.

Why is your book subtitled: "The End of the World as We Know It"?

Ken Auletta: Because the media world we grew accustomed to is no more, washed over by the digital wave. This is not just true of newspapers and magazines and books, with their expensive and inefficient reliance on dead trees for paper and cumbersome printing presses and pollution belching trucks to distribute them.

It's also true of an advertising world that guesses who it is reaching when companies like Google can identify who is clicking on ads. It is true of movie theaters that may not be able to sell enough popcorn to withstand the threat from downloaded movies. It is true of telephone companies who will find it difficult to compete with free calls and applications that consumers—not the telephone companies—will control. It is true of software that may no longer be sold in expensive Microsoft packages and will instead be available for "free" on Google's cloud. ... (Read the full interview)