Google and Its Enemies

Jonathan Last:

In 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded a company called Google, about which you likely know quite a bit. The outgrowth of work Page and Brin began in 1996 on hypertextual search engines, Google has moved from darling little high-concept innovator to Microsoft-like behemoth in record time. Google employs over 15,000 people, has a stock price hovering near $700 a share, and is the all-powerful advertising and search force on the Internet. It is gradually pushing and purchasing its way into entertainment, business software, and even the cellular telephone market.

Before Page and Brin started Google, however, they were graduate students working on Stanford's Digital Library Technologies project, which sought to digitally store and catalogue books, newspapers, and scholarly journals. Page, in particular, seems to carry a torch for this endeavor. In 2002 he approached his alma mater, the University of Michigan, about digitizing the library. It was the birth of the Google Library Project, one of the most ambitious undertakings in the history of the written word. It was also a move that would create for Google--a company obsessed with its own beneficence--a crowd of enemies...

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