bamgoogled

I've started to read "Googled: The End of the World As We Know It" by Ken Auletta. I told myself I had to start reading some non-fiction books (my head can't be in the clouds all the time), and I got bored of the book written by the Baja Fresh guy (and got turned off by its ridiculously huge font size). I figured I work in the digital advertising world, specifically search marketing, so why not learn more about the foundation and growing dominance of the greatest online advertising company of all time?

Few things I learned in the first two chapters:

• Both founders Larry Page & Sergey Brin come from brilliant (as in highly intelligent) families that started from very humble beginnings
  
• Google was originally going to be called Backrub, then the Whatbox (but sounded too close to wetbox), then Googol (which means the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes), but that name was taken so had to settle on Google
• Google gives their employees X amount of hours a week to work on their own individual projects (quite awesome)
  
• Their slogan is "Don't be evil" (I'd raise an eyebrow to that)
  

As I was reading the book, I couldn't help but get goosebumps from thinking about how small the company started out, knowing what Google is today. With its search engine, gmail, gchat, google reader, google docs, mobile phone apps, and now google+, Google will penetrate every little channel of our lives. It's a wee bit frightening if you really think about it. I even wrote a blog entry on how Google knows your interests and even builds a profile for you based on your browsing history, tracking your every move... Google knows more about you than your family, your friends, your lover, possibly even yourself!

Also, whenever any other company pulls off something innovative and successful, Google either buys them out (i.e. YouTube, Blogspot) or tries to replicate and one-up them (i.e. Google Offers with GroupOn, Google+ with Facebook). How can a company so menacing and monopolizing not be evil?

Easy- by having cute and clever google doodles every holiday.

Google back in the day:

Hey... where'd that exclamation point go?


and for ol' time's sake:

I remember back in the day when Facebook was called thefacebook, and there was that non-descript shadow of a man (Mark Zuckerberg, is that you?) overlaid with cryptic numbers. It was oh-so-exclusive, and I felt somewhat special to be on it. But now everyone and their mom's (literally) are on it, and it somehow lost its appeal to me (Anyone else a lil' surprised that UC Davis was among the first 30 schools with early admission?)