Don’t be evil, please

Google amazes. Type anything—“spatula”—into its search field and, within one-third of a second, discover more than you probably wanted to know about spatulas, even the naughty bits. But you already know this; Sergey Brin and Larry Page turned their Stanford University doctorate thesis into Google, the world’s most popular search engine. A decade later, Google the company is now the world’s most dominant—a game changer, revolutionizing the advertising, publishing, news, entertainment, information and technology industries. Ken Auletta’s book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, explores the good and bad: Are Google’s engineers so myopic, what with their unchecked data mining and lack of sensitivity to privacy matters, that “Don’t be evil” is an embarrassing mantra instead of an admonition? Longstanding media scribe Auletta chats with traditional- and new-media players to paint a picture of Google’s future—and information in an era of über-rapid change.