The searchers: what it was like working for Larry and Sergey during Google's pioneering first years.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: On political books - I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Book review

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59

by Douglas Edwards

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 432 pp.

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Escapees and wanderers have their mysterious allure, but among those who have contributed most to American mythology are the dreamers who ventured into the open spaces in order to fulfill a destiny that was thwarted in their present circumstances, but who became builders of new communities in which they found fame, made fortunes, and tried to establish some purer place. In doing so, they ended up carving the virgin terrain into physical and cultural shapes that in some cases enriched the lives of their descendants and in others became the borders that confined their lives.

The best parts of I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions off Google Employee Number 59, Douglas Edwards's intermittently interesting account of five years spent at Google during its start-up years (some of them not yet a decade past), are those that capture the excitement of being among the explorers and builders who have ventured forth into the new century's new world. Its enormous success aside, Google is a particularly apt company to watch during this period; Google, at root, is a search engine, and, with other search engines like Alta Vista and Inktomi and so on, it performed the function that Lewis and Clark and Captain Cook and other explorers performed in previous centuries, namely, mapping the unknown world.

While it is true, reading an account of encountering Pacific aboriginals will always read more dramatically than accounts of the crises confronted during a tech company's growing years ("Here, attach this cable to that server--now!), we have to take the new world as we find it. Besides, some of these tales can be quite exciting. For example, things got pretty touch and go the day a cornerstone deal between the established Netscape and the up-and-coming Google went live. Suddenly a Mississippi of search requests swamped Google's servers, which nearly caused a systemic breakdown, which was avoided only when Larry Page, cofounder of Google with Sergey Brin, boldly ordered that Google stop responding to search requests from people coming to the Google site, and handle only requests coming from Netscape, until more server capacity could be brought on board. This averted paralysis preserved the all-important business relationship and enhanced the young company's credibility.

Okay, it's not wrestling a bear, but then, what is these...