Google

In 1998 two Stanford graduate students published a paper describing a new kind of search engine — and buried in it a warning that advertising-funded search would be "inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers." Then they went out and built the largest advertising-funded search engine that has ever existed. What happened in between is one of the defining stories of our age. E.B Cohen tells the whole story of search — not just of a company, but of humanity's oldest hunger, the hunger to find things out. It begins long before Google, with Vannevar Bush's dream machine and the pre-Google engines that fumbled toward an answer: Archie, Lycos, the mighty AltaVista, Yahoo's hand-built directory. It follows Larry Page and Sergey Brin from a Stanford dorm to a Menlo Park garage, and the deceptively simple idea — that a link is a vote — that let them bring order to the chaos of the web. From PageRank to the ad auction that quietly became the most profitable machine in commercial history; from the infrastructure that reinvented computing to the empire of free products — Gmail, Maps, Android, Chrome, YouTube — that orbited the search engine; from the birth of Alphabet to the Transformer that Google itself invented and that would come back to threaten it; to the ChatGPT shock, the scramble to answer with AI, and the 2024 courtroom where a judge ruled the machine had become an illegal monopoly. Rigorous, vivid, and even-handed about privacy, power, and the price of "free," this is the story of how finding out stopped being hard — and what we handed over in exchange.