Google It!: A History of Google by Anna Crowley Redding (review)

It seems counterintuitive: this breezily written corporate history invites kids curious about all things Google not to Google it, but to read a book. The first part deals with the story (dare we say, legend) of Google roots, with all the episodes that have passed into lore, from Larry Page and Sergey Brin's class assignment that morphed into an ethically dubious project ("borrowing" heavily from Stanford's stock of hardware, electricity, and bandwidth), and thence into a company with lofty goals and ideals—organizing and efficiently accessing information of all stripes and sources, and committing to the mantra "Don't be evil." Part two presses on to the expansion phase, after challenges of monetization and had been solved and an IPO released, and Google headquarters became a brainiac fun magnet (good caf food, ping pong tables, and permission to bring dogs). Here readers encounter the Googlettes that the company developed, spun off, or hoovered up, from Mail and Maps, to YouTube and Niantic. Part three deals with the holding company, Alphabet, and such futuristic "moonshots" as AI, driverless cars, wearable technology, etc. This is largely an adulatory portrait; Redding points out remarkably few snakes in this tour of paradise, barely pausing to note the lack of child care in the employee-friendly offices, privacy concerns at the Gmail rollout, YouTube ads that have popped up with questionable content, crises in reconciling "Don't be evil" with concessions to Chinese censorship, and that high-tech Edsel, Google Glass. With an extensive bibliography of mainly online resources appended, though, readers can always, you know, Google it.