"In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives" - Steven Levy is an excellent history of Google, which covers key points in the history of the company, how it started, grew and became huge.
The interesting aspect of the book is how Google struggles with the "do no evil" mandate that they try to live by, even when they are now huge enough that some consider them in the "evil" role formerly occupied by Microsoft and earlier by IBM in various periods of recent computer history.
Trying to imagine the pre-Google world is difficult. When I was in graduate school, Windows was not yet the standard on the desktop (Windows 3.0 was the first really big Windows product) and there were DOS, UNIX and other machines operating. E-mail was pretty new - grad school was my first e-address. Most of the internet was vague to most people, and was primarily file sharing point-to-point, with newsgroups and bulletin boards providing some of the services now taken fro granted.
Google was originally a search algorithm, which provided better results than competitors, primarily by considering websites somewhat like academic articles - keywords may serve a role, but it is the central usage of key players that determines importance. In academia, this is citations - the more your work is referenced and built upon, the higher "importance" that work can be thought of to have. Google put this to work and was able to determine importance of websites by visit and linkages in a similar manner. By itself, this innovation would have been important. The bigger impact was to apply this lesson to advertising - to let the "value" of the ads to consumers (e.g. us) determine ranking, and to link ads most of interest to customers rather than to link ads randomly. This allowed Google to do what many start-ups couldn't do - make tons of money, and do so in a tri-mutually beneficial way (Google made money - it was happy; advertisers were only charged if people paid attention to the ads and clicked - they were happy; customers were less harrangued by ads that had little or no interest to them, and in some cases, found the ads were as meaningful as the search they were undertaking - they were happy).
Thus, Google was able to live up to the "do not evil" idea. Free e-mail and much cloud-based applications and storage are all due, in large part, to Google, who can afford to provide free products to customers, as it lends itself nicely to the advertising model which provides they money - they aren't required to profit from the application(s) and service(s) themselves, they help feed the information and advertising model that drives the profits.
Living to this standard became more difficult when they introduced free e-mail, but decided to search the mail files to target advertising (considered a breach of privacy - particularly at the time), or to make forays into China, a country that wants to screen and censor information.
All in all, a great read - easy to follow, compelling stories, interesting personalities (not always in agreement) and a contemporary timeframe (all the stories, issues and concerns are recent enough to resonate with most readers).
I come away from the "In the plex" with a new respect for Google, and the innovations that made the company successful, though I can't avoid the feeling that much of the "best days" from a "do no evil" or even from a "wow, that's cool" perspective are behind them (a belief shared by some employees who left for smaller start-ups, to regain some of the early-Google feelings). This is not to say that Google has become evil, it is just much more difficult to play that role when everything you do is magnified to the scale that the current Google corporation is - every step, or mis-step is going to make waves - some waves are beneficial, oxygenating and re-vitalizing the water, others grow and become tsunamis.
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