Google's towering ambition | The quest | The Economist

Another review of the new Stross Google book 

Randall Stross, a journalist at the New York Times, does a good job of analysing this unbounded ambition by organising Google’s quest into its thematic components. One chapter is about the prodigious data centres that Google is building with a view to storing all that information, another about the algorithms at the heart of its web search and advertising technology, another about its approach to dead-tree information bound in books, its vision for geographical information and so forth. He is at his best when explaining how Google’s mission casually but lethally smashes into long-existing institutions such as, say, copyright law or privacy norms.

Google's towering ambition | The quest | The Economist