Planet Google: How One Company is Transforming Our Lives
By Randall Stross
Atlantic Books £16.99, 288 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View of Europe
By Jean-Noël Jeanneney
Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan
University of Chicago Press, $11, 96 pages

Search Engine Society
By Alexander Halavais
Polity Press £13.99, 196 pages

Sometime in the last year, a flotilla of cars began to appear on the streets of central London. They weren’t hard to spot: bolted to their roofs were unwieldy, sinister-looking mechanical cameras which stared outwards as they raced along major thoroughfares. It turned out they were snapping thousands of pictures on behalf of Google Street View, the latest addition to the company’s mapping experiments, Google Earth and Google Maps. The project was launched in US cities in May 2007, and was then extended to a range of cities around Europe.

My own introduction to this took place at a set of traffic lights one day as I was walking back from the supermarket to my home on London’s Old Kent Road. It was like one of those awkward encounters with aliens from a more advanced planet. No longer was Google only something we did with our internet search box. With one of the company’s cameras standing directly in front of me, only a few metres from my front door, there was no clearer evidence: I was being Googled.

Google is now 10 years old, and in that decade it has become one of the world’s most recognisable brands. There’s no doubt that Google is everywhere in our lives. But how exactly has Google changed us, and what lessons can we really draw from its success? Three recent books – one by a professor of business, one by a cultural historian and one by a technology academic – all attempt to answer that question in different ways.

Randall Stross is a business professor at San José State University and writes about Silicon Valley for the New York Times. In Planet Google, he chronicles the rise of the company: the brainwave of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, two young computer science buffs who met in the mid-1990s as graduate students at Stanford University and began to play around with the technology for search and retrieval of online text.

The promise – and problem – of the internet is the abundance of information available on it. To organise this information and work out how to rank and display it to the user, the pair arrived at a formula. This calculated the number of links which pointed to a particular webpage, and then the number of links which in turn led to those sites. In other words, it measured the worth of a piece of information by drawing a detailed map of how many and which kinds of people used it. They went further, too, feeding back into the system information about how many people chose a webpage from a given display that Google presented to them.

The precise mathematical formula that the pair used to weigh those links is known as Google’s algorithm. It now services roughly three-fifths of all internet searches, and has made Google more money that its founders could ever have imagined. Five years ago, Stross tells us, it had only 1,600 employees on its payroll; now it has nearly 20,000. In 2002, Google’s net income was $100m; five years later, it had leapt to $4.2bn.

If Google had been happy just to power the world’s web searches, that would have been enough to give it incredible clout. Its relentless pursuit of the world’s information, however, has made its story one of broader significance. In 1999, a year after it was incorporated, Google announced that its mission was nothing less than to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

As the money rolls in from the ads that run alongside its searches, Google has gone about this information organisation with almost reckless abandon. The company, Stross tells us, has embarked on an audacious mission to digitise and make available the world’s books – each of the 32 million titles listed in WorldCat, a catalogue that encompasses 25,000 libraries around the world.

In February 2005 came Google’s digital mapping service, Google Maps. Then came the Google Earth project in 2006, which has brought satellite images to the masses and allowed us all to roam the world from our desks, armed with only a computer and a mouse. After that came Street View, which saw Google’s cameras finally descend to street level. Its obsessive pursuit of the world’s information led it to set up gmail, its own e-mail program; to buy up the popular DIY broadcaster YouTube at a cost of $1.65 bn; even to invest in 23andMe, a Silicon Valley start-up, which offers people the chance to “browse” information on their individual genome.

Stross’s biography of Google is diligently researched, and benefits from rare insider access to those at the top of the organisation. He is candid enough to admit, however, that the company’s business model has been little more than a happy accident. For all its talk about organising the world’s information, 99 per cent of Google’s revenue is generated by those little text ads which accompany searches filtered through its distinctive algorithm.

It is Google’s effect on our culture that is more significant than its business success, and here Stross’s book can be of no more than marginal help. As befits a former president of the prestigious Bibliothèque Nationale de France however, Jean-Noël Jeanneney takes Google’s impact on our cultural life much more seriously. In 2005, Jeanneney wrote an article for Le Monde which criticised Google’s book search project. That article became this book, Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge (2006) and provoked a vigorous international debate about Google’s search machinery and the rapacious effect it might have on cultures around the world.

Given that there are too many books in the world to digitise and upload every one, Jeanneney argues, “We must wonder what books will be chosen, what criteria will determine the list.” The problem with Google’s algorithm, he says, is that it is likely to drive more and more eyeballs towards Anglo-American interpretations of history and world events.

Jeanneney’s annoyance with the company is visceral; his book drips with suspicion of American motives, and this slim, sometimes ill-tempered volume reads like a manifesto in favour of cultural diversity. His idea of what culture is, however, is too brittle and precious. Culture thrives on contamination; if it is any good, alien influences can only strengthen it in the long run.

Where Jeanneney is surely right, however, is to shift the debate about Google on to cultural terrain. Alexander Halavais, a professor of interactive communications at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, is also explicitly concerned with the social and cultural consequences of our dependence on search engines. In his book Search Engine Society, he offers a quick tour of the issues as he discusses what impact Google might have on democracy, privacy, even our attention span. Though he recognises some of the “dangers”, he is more sanguine than Jeanneney about what the effects might be.

Search engines, Halavais argues, are now our switchboard as well as the first place we look for information. In under a second, online searches can transport us to just about any digital bit of information which exists. On the other hand, Halavais points out, the winding way we hop around from one hyperlink to another after each search throws up myriad opportunities for serendipitous encounters with information we didn’t know that we wanted.

This game of seeking out and finding information is an entirely fresh addition to our culture, and we are only at the early stages of working out what it will do to us to have it around. Halavais’s book offers some helpful pointers, but – perhaps because he is so awed by search technology – his book doesn’t go far enough to assess Google’s impact on the rest of our lives. Indeed, if there is one thing all three of these authors have in common, it’s that they ascribe too much power to Google’s search box. “In an era in which knowledge is the only real bankable commodity”, Halavais concludes, “search engines own the exchange floor.” Randall Stross agrees. Every age has a raw material that defines its historical moment, Stross claims – coal, steel and oil, for example. “In ours it is information, and Google has become its pre-eminent steward.”

Jeanneney, meanwhile, thinks Google’s algorithm could undo French civilisation. Academics and intellectuals are not the only ones to be awed by the power of Google. Almost everyone wants to bask in its reputation, it seems. Companies and institutions are adapting what they do to meet the demands of our Google-powered world. Politicians such as David Cameron, Britain’s opposition leader for example, are keen to make the pilgrimage to Google’s conference, and be seen under its banner. And last month even the Queen paid homage to Google, when she visited the company’s London headquarters. Maybe she quietly Googles herself all the time.

Whatever people might think, however, information is not power. Power is power. It is what we do with the information that bubbles up from Google’s algorithm that will clinch the cultural argument. Just because Google is our window on to the web, in other words, we should be wary of surrendering our judgment to its electronic machine. The alternative is to live in a world in which, as Halavais worries, we begin to believe that the number of Google hits a name conjures up is an indicator of its popularity or even its professional worth.

Jeanneney is right to insist that any culture needs to organise its information to reflect its priorities, and that it’s not enough to leave this to an automatic device. The classification system of the traditional library, he reminds us, is evident in books’ arrangement on the shelves, which encourages readers to browse those books in certain ways. It is possible that our facility with search technology will encourage new, looser ways of categorising books which encourage us to take our own path through libraries. It will not, however, be enough to leave readers to rely on pointers from their anonymous online peers. For institutions, the trick will be to adapting to changed cultural sensibilities – our determination to forge our own path through information and make our own associations between things – without surrendering ourselves entirely to Google’s algorithm.

In September last year, Google announced that it had digitised and indexed about a million of the world’s books – not bad, but well short of its target. A couple of years before that, according to Stross, Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt was asked how long it might take for Google to organise all the world’s information. “Current estimate,” he replied, “300 years.” Only a company with Google’s Promethean ambitions could think with such extravagant time-horizons. With 300 years’ notice to organise our response, we can’t say that we haven’t been warned.

James Harkin’s book ‘Cyburbia: The Dangerous Idea That’s Changing How We Live and Who We Are’ will be published in February by Little, Brown in the UK and by Knopf in Canada