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I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by [Edwards, Douglas]
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I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 Kindle Edition

4.0 out of 5 stars 104 customer reviews

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Length: 406 pages Word Wise: Enabled Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
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Product details

  • Format: Kindle Edition
  • File Size: 3373 KB
  • Print Length: 406 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin (28 July 2011)
  • Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
  • Language: English
  • ASIN: B0057WLCTO
  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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  • Word Wise: Enabled
  • Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars 104 customer reviews
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #232,361 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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By Peter Lee TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on 15 July 2011
Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )
I wasn't expecting much from this book, fearing something tedious and overly-technical, dry and dull, but instead I found it was hugely enjoyable, fascinating, and extremely easy to read.

Doug Edwards was Google's 59th employee, joining the company in its infancy when the staff worked in one tiny building, made their own servers out of cork boards with components pinned to them (so they could fit four servers into the space normally occupied by one "proper" server in a rack cabinet) and focused entirely on making searching the internet faster, easier, and better. Doug sees the company grow and evolve, and he finds himself burning the midnight oil, often undermined by his managers, and eventually decides that the time is right to leave (the book ends in 2005.) There is also a fair amount of coverage of Google's battles with the likes of Inktomi, Yahoo and Microsoft, all of which is interesting, sometimes a little shocking.

Some have complained that the book has lots of padding but I didn't think this was the case at all. I actually found it quite riveting, often quite amusing, and surprisingly free of technical jargon, although the glossary of terms at the back is handy if you want to know the difference between a Noogler and a Xoogler for instance. Don't expect to find out the secrets of how Google's software works or what their corporate strategy is, or their future plans. Instead this book is a hugely enjoyable and very human tale of what it is like to work for a high-tech company that grew from nothing extremely quickly, and how they changed the world in their own way.

Quite possibly my favourite book of 2011 so far. I loved it.
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By Brett H TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on 21 Jun. 2011
Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )
Most people know that Google is a bit special. To evolve from a two man operation in 1996 to become one of America's biggest companies, not far short of Microsoft or Apple, is some achievement. Clearly they only did this by breaking the mould in a fairly significant way. It is pretty obvious that they are different. You only have to look at their main webpage to appreciate this. As the book explains, it is not so much what is there, but what is not there. The leading search engine in the late 1990s was Yahoo and their main page was so crammed with facts, adverts, links etc, that it was quite hard to spot the search box. Google decided early on to go in a completely different direction and keep their main page very simple. That is the way it is to this day, mimicked by the likes of Bing, imitation being the sincerest form of flattery. They have never been afraid to be different and to think outside of the box.

The author was Google's 59th hire, hence the title of the book and joined the company in 1999. He was employed to head up marketing rather than being a techie in a very tech led company. This book covers his experiences between 1999 and 2005 and is a fascinating insight into how the company was run and what made it different. Google had a very flat management structure so everyone got involved in all aspects of the organisation and you get the inside track from Douglas Edwards on how these decisions were made. Innovation covered every aspect of Google. For example, unlike most start up internet companies, they did not go for state of the art hardware. Instead they put together a huge number of the cheapest servers they could cobble together and did not worry when some of them failed as there was always redundant capacity.
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Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )
If you were entranced watching the stratospheric rise of Google from fringe search engine to one of the largest economies on Earth, you'll enjoy many happy hours immersed in the pages of I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. If you appreciate Google's dogged insistence on creating a search engine that actually works as users want it to (rather than simply looking flashy), this book will resonate with you. If you consider the term 'computer nerd' a compliment rather than a put-down, you'll find nirvana in the pages of this book.

Douglas Edwards's descriptions of Google's key players, especially co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, give unique insights into the people behind one of the the world's biggest brand names. Brin and Page always had a clear vision of what they wanted Google to achieve. The most readable parts of the book are its humanising portraits of the men behind the brand name. For example, one Hallowe'en Sergey Brin conducted an interview wearing a full cow suit. As a nervous young prospective Google employee stuttered and stammered his way through the interview, Brin sat back on his chair and played with his rubber udders. Many such entertaining stories are peppered throughout the book, making it a must-have item for any Google aficionados. By reducing the amount of technical data included (about server sizes, speeds, etc.), Douglas Edwards could have increased the book's readability while cutting down its length, thereby helping his book to appeal to a wider market. As it stands, the lengthy tome is for hardcore Googlophiles only.
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Format: Hardcover Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )
I found this book tedious and a little bit dull.

As interesting as the story of Google is, this account doesn't hold my interest. In fact my interest started to wane when I got a few pages in. The authors accounts and exaggerated or should I say enthusiastic descriptions all start to sound the same and get a tad boring. It's interesting enough if you're die hard about this stuff but for me, an I imagine most people, it's just a bit tedious.

But I guess as one other reviewer wrote, if someone wrote an account of AlstaVista, it wouldn't be as interesting, or at least relevant, to most people. Google is Google, everyone has heard of them but not many people will care about the detailed accounts this book goes into.
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