SiliconBeat

Journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, but with 5,000 articles spontaneously materializing out of the ether each time Google makes a product announcement, you’d be excused for wondering what, if anything, is left to be written in the second draft, which is traditionally a more heavily researched and thoughtful long-form manuscript.
The answer, in the case of a new book by Richard Brandt, a former long-time Business Week reporter who also spent five years editing Upside magazine, is quite a lot.
“Inside Larry & Sergey’s Brain,” which will be published in September by Portfolio, is chockfull of new insights about one of the world’s most thoroughly scrutinized companies. It illustrates the value that thorough, straightforward, extensive shoe-leather reporting can bring to a even the most over-exposed subject.
Gracefully written, the book compares the project to create Google with the effort to build the Library at Alexandria in the third century BC. Starting with Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s noteworthy success in out negotiating two of the world’s most influential venture capital firms at Google’s inception and continuing through the short tenure and mysterious departure of renown medical activist Larry Brilliant from Google.org this year, Brandt’s book sheds light on the unique management style of Google’s co-founders.
Unlike a series of recent books on Google that seek to capitalize on the company’s success, Brandt’s book is more than a cursory clip job. He spent several years interviewing current and former employees of the Internet giant and attending meetings and events at the Googleplex in Mountain View.
As a result, Brandt gets a number of things right. Most notably Brandt, manages to avoid easy cynicism, which is the first trap of any newbie reporter or book writer who takes on the company as a subject. And as a long-time technology writer, he knows the difference between cloud computing and client computing and doesn’t let technical details get in the way of his story.
In contrast, the newly published “Google Speaks,” by Janet Lowe, appears to be based almost entirely on other articles, which led the veteran author to such bizarre assertions as the patently wrong claim that Flickr was bought by Google and the more puzzling statement that Hewlett Packard once owned the Altavista search engine. (Flickr was bought by Yahoo, and Altavista was created by Digital Equipment Corporation, which was sold to Compaq in 1999, which was sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2002. In 2003 Altavista was sold to Overture which was then bought by Yahoo. So Lowe is technical correctly about the chain of ownership while simultaneously appearing totally confused about which facts are relevant in Silicon Valley’s complicated corporate histories.)
Demonstrating an equally shaky grasp of technology, Lowe also asserts that Google is using “deep-packet inspection” to observe a user’s Web browsing experience, a puzzling attempt to link Google to a controversial intelligence-gathering process. In reality, Google can observe users’ Web browser experiences not because it uses a sophisticated technology, but because users choose to allow Google to store their personal data.
In Lowe’s defense, writing about technology and covering the technology industry is usually a full-time job, and it takes time for even the most brilliant and talented writers to get up to speed.
That is the advantage Brandt holds. Readers interested in acquiring a deeper understanding of Google’s world would be hard-pressed to find a more knowledgeable guide.