Steven Levy

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

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“The most interesting book ever written about Google” (The Washington Post) delivers the inside story behind the most successful and admired technology company of our time, now updated with a new Afterword.
Google is arguably the most important company in the world today, with such pervasive influence that its name is a verb. The company founded by two Stanford graduate students—Larry Page and Sergey Brin—has become a tech giant known the world over. Since starting with its search engine, Google has moved into mobile phones, computer operating systems, power utilities, self-driving cars, all while remaining the most powerful company in the advertising business.
Granted unprecedented access to the company, Levy disclosed that the key to Google’s success in all these businesses lay in its engineering mindset and adoption of certain internet values such as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk-taking. Levy discloses details behind Google’s relationship with China, including how Brin disagreed with his colleagues on the China strategy—and why its social networking initiative failed; the first time Google tried chasing a successful competitor. He examines Google’s rocky relationship with government regulators, particularly in the EU, and how it has responded when employees left the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups.
In the Plex is the “most authoritative…and in many ways the most entertaining” (James Gleick, The New York Book Review) account of Google to date and offers “an instructive primer on how the minds behind the world’s most influential internet company function” (Richard Waters, The Wall Street Journal).
This book is currently unavailable
718 printed pages
Original publication
2011
Publication year
2011
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Quotes

  • Anthonyhas quoted8 years ago
    kite-surfing teachers looking for students in their zip code.
    In addition, people uploading videos for free viewing might be willing to pay Google to promote them as sponsored links—a one-click connection would then appear alongside organic search results like an AdWords ad, in either the search results page or the results page from a YouTube search. YouTube also began experimenting with “interest-based” advertising, in which ads would be personalized to the subjects that users had previously accessed. (This would be something that privacy-conscious users could opt out of.) Finally, YouTube was exploring something that Google Video had tried without success: paid viewing for premium videos.
  • Anthonyhas quoted8 years ago
    A lot of his ideas for monetization, though, had the spirit of AdWords. Just as with Google search keywords, sometimes it was appropriate to show relevant ads with videos, sometimes not. “If I’m watching a kite-surfing video, it’s very likely that I’d be interested in buying the board that the kite surfer is on or taking a lesson from that person,” he says. Taking advantage of this symbiosis would open the door for bigger advertisers selling sports equipment or bathing suits, as well as small, long-tail advertisers, such as
  • Anthonyhas quoted8 years ago
    But maybe the biggest contribution that Kamangar made was putting an end to the “silver bullet” theory—that lurking in someone’s imagination was a multibillion-dollar idea that would enrich YouTube as dramatically as AdWords had transformed Google’s bottom line. Since Kamangar had cocreated AdWords, he was able to declare that no such equivalent existed and YouTube should develop a broader, multifaceted revenue strategy, making use of some of the concepts of Google’s ad model but hitting some corner shots as well.

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