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Gwern's Reviews > In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy (Goodreads Author)
by Steven Levy (Goodreads Author)
I learned a great deal from this book about Google, which put some of my own experiences with Google products in context. Levy has information, anecdotes, quotes, and interviews which no one else does, which, like the recent Steve Jobs biography, makes his book indispensable for anyone interested in the topic regardless of the book's other merits.
To continue the Jobs analogy, I *think* Levy is more independent of his subject and more willing to criticize it and poke holes in their narratives - he covers the criticisms I expected, doesn't drop any particularly glaring issues, and more than once undermines their narratives with contrasting quotes & observations. In particular, Page repeatedly comes off as a narcissistic paranoid asshole, possibly due to his father's death, who cannot empathize with others or understand their points of views (a trait perhaps endemic of Googlers, to judge by the Buzz fiasco).
But to compensate for all the great info and explanations (more than once I thought to myself, 'ah, so *that* is what happened!'), there are downsides to the book. The principle one being:
Levy's writing/presentation is extremely journalistic and dumbed down. I'm not sure whether Levy simply doesn't understand programming & computers very well despite his long career covering the tech industry, or if he deliberately treats technical topics simplistically. (A description of JavaScript prefixes it with the undefined buzzword 'dynamic', although dynamic runtime typing is far from the most important aspect of JS; someone writing an early web spider is described as having a break through when they realize they can make it multithreaded, while I'm sitting back and thinking "there is no way that even in ~1995, any programmer, upon noticing that their web spider was not crawling as many URLs as he needs, would not instantly reach for multiprocessing/multithreading".) Similar simplisticness applied to the legal discussions as well (you won't come away with a real understanding of all the legal issues at play in the Google Books contretemps), and the economic ones fared much the same (I was glad Levy covered the auction innovations at Google, but couldn't he explain *why* second-price auctions are so elegant and effective?).
To continue the Jobs analogy, I *think* Levy is more independent of his subject and more willing to criticize it and poke holes in their narratives - he covers the criticisms I expected, doesn't drop any particularly glaring issues, and more than once undermines their narratives with contrasting quotes & observations. In particular, Page repeatedly comes off as a narcissistic paranoid asshole, possibly due to his father's death, who cannot empathize with others or understand their points of views (a trait perhaps endemic of Googlers, to judge by the Buzz fiasco).
But to compensate for all the great info and explanations (more than once I thought to myself, 'ah, so *that* is what happened!'), there are downsides to the book. The principle one being:
Levy's writing/presentation is extremely journalistic and dumbed down. I'm not sure whether Levy simply doesn't understand programming & computers very well despite his long career covering the tech industry, or if he deliberately treats technical topics simplistically. (A description of JavaScript prefixes it with the undefined buzzword 'dynamic', although dynamic runtime typing is far from the most important aspect of JS; someone writing an early web spider is described as having a break through when they realize they can make it multithreaded, while I'm sitting back and thinking "there is no way that even in ~1995, any programmer, upon noticing that their web spider was not crawling as many URLs as he needs, would not instantly reach for multiprocessing/multithreading".) Similar simplisticness applied to the legal discussions as well (you won't come away with a real understanding of all the legal issues at play in the Google Books contretemps), and the economic ones fared much the same (I was glad Levy covered the auction innovations at Google, but couldn't he explain *why* second-price auctions are so elegant and effective?).
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