GOOGLE IT by Anna Crowley Redding is an easy to read, but
detail-filled, positive summary of the history of Google. It begins with some
surprising facts about the childhoods and Stanford years of founders Sergey
Brin and Larry Page. And I especially loved the idea that citation in academic
papers is what prompted Page to consider using backlinks to develop PageRank. As an early internet user, it was also fun to
reflect upon descriptions that Redding shares about internet download speeds
(0.056 megabytes per second) of twenty years or so ago versus today’s
expectations (20 Mbps). School Library
Journal recommends this book for grades 6 and up – I agree, although I also
feel that our high school students could use this for background and as an interesting
and very basic start to a paper that would evolve into a discussion of one or
more of the many controversies which Google has faced.
Upon reflection, not providing a more thorough review of
these issues is a missed opportunity and therefore a weakness of GOOGLE
IT. Redding mentions the concerns about censorship in China, for
example, but she could have included more recent events related to that idea versus
just explaining that the Chinese mainland based search engine was shut down by
Google in 2010. Instead, she truly is
focused on providing a very accessible history with chapters on older topics
like Y2K and creation of the Google logo. Again, she mentions hiring the first
female engineer (Marissa Mayer, Google employee #20) in 1999, but that is the
only time the word female appears in the book and the word women does not
appear at all, despite a history of concerns about prejudices, James Damore’s viral
memo and subsequent firing, and the macho Silicon Valley culture in general. Redding
does comment briefly about recent (2017) efforts to establish “Howard West” and
thereby support and increase the percentage of African American employees (2.5%
in most recent Google report). Likewise, she writes
about privacy, but does not really address employee concerns about Defense Department contracts and she seems more interested
in the possibility of bringing search to remote locations rather than issues
with tracking users who may have switched off “location services.” In addition, there is
no explanation of antitrust or the record five billion dollar European fine. Sadly,
the word “ethics” appears only once in Redding’s text although she, like Christopher Mims’ article in today's Wall Street
Journal, refers to Google’s motto (“Don’t be evil”) and its stated mission
to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and
useful.”
