Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta is intriguing, riveting and more then just a story about Google but also a brief history of the Internet.

Auletta reminds us of how initially the power of the Internet was dismissed by many, if not most.  In hindsight, Viacom Chairman’s, Summer Redstone,  1994 comments about the Internet are unbelievably erroneous “… it seems apparent that the Information Superhighway, at least to the extent that it is defined in extravagant and esoteric applications, is a long way coming if it comes at all.”  Redstone wasn’t alone in this belief.  In a 1994 memo to Bill Gates, Microsoft staff called the Internet “hype.”  The following year, however, Bill Gates  wrote an internal  memo to his staff titled The Internet Tidal Wave, where he assigns the Internet “the highest level of importance.”

That same year, 1995, Mary Meeker with Chris DePuy, both Morgan Stanley analysts, co-authored The Internet Report touting “the hottest new market to develop in years.”   More than a hundred thousand copies of this report were downloaded and the report   eventually became a book.  Within a decade the Internet had reached more than 50 percent of Americans, an astonishing velocity in integration not seen before.  Auletta writes “It took telephone seventy-one years to penetrate 50 percent of American homes, electricity fifty-two years, and TV three decades.”

The Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are technological geniuses with a conviction that they can make the world a better place with their free, precise search technology.  In the beginning and for several years after, they are unclear about how to make a profit from their free product.  Nevertheless, they are confident that there is profit to be made from the power of determining what information a person looks at.  They have a strong conviction of keeping their searches non-commercial and are willing to be patient in making a profit.  Their altruistic philosophy permeates at Google, the company adopts  “Don’t be Evil” as a motto.

One of the first brilliant concepts that made Google so successful in search and revolutionized how we obtain information on the Internet  is PageRank.  PageRank, named after Larry Page, relies on “the wisdom of crowds.” The Google algorithm ranks web pages by the number of people that link to that page.  The more visitors a page gets the higher up they appear in a related search.  Google’s ranking of a page would not depend on advertising dollars as it did with the initial search engines such as Yahoo and  AltaVista.

Google eventually found a way to make money.  AdWords allowed potential advertisers to bid to place a small text ads next to the results for key search words.  They only had to pay for actual clicks made to the ad making this business model very efficient to advertisers.  In 2007, Google acquired DoubleClick, “the foremost digital marketing company.”  Google now owned 40% of both the domestic and international online advertising market.  Google had become a juggernaut and a threat to traditional media.

By 2000, Google was the most visited search engine on the Web.  This colossal traffic allowed Google to gather more information from the user and to make its searches more precise.  Auletta says “[m]ore searches generated more data for Google about users, which led to better searches, which would eventually lead to more ad dollars.”

The first signs of privacy concerns appear in 2004, when the “Don’t be Evil” company  launched Gmail without a delete button.  The principle behind this concept was that because Google provided huge amount of memory capacity, there was no need to delete e-mails.  Additionally, Google started AdSense – “a way to make money from e-mail by placing ads when certain keywords were typed.”  A public research center in Washington, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, that focuses on privacy and civil liberties issues, declared Gmail “an unprecedented invasion into the sanctity of private communications.”   In 2006 Google relented and added a delete button.  But the privacy debate had begun.

According to Auletta, Terry Winograd, a Stanford professor and one of Google’s first collaborators, thought that “Google relied so much on science, on data, and mathematical algorithms, that it was insensitive to legitimate privacy fears.”  By now, it wasn’t only privacy concerns that were an issue, Google News and Google Books raised copyright distress as well.

Google has become enormously profitable based on the data it collects from its users.  For Google to remain the “Don’t be Evil” company, and not to become the “Evil Empire” it will need to seriously ponder the privacy concerns that have arisen.  Become more transparent in their data collection of user information, and most importantly offer users to opt-out.  Just as Eric Schmidt, Google’s Chairman/CEO, was aghast when a CNET reporter published his home address net worth, political contributions, and other personal information – all information gathered via Google –  so to are Google users horrified at what personal information is available about them on Google.

My plea to Google: remember your altruistic roots.  Take the time to make privacy issues your number one concern.  Start a national conversation not only about privacy issues, but also about cyberbullying and other Internet diseases.  “Don’t be Evil” should not be just about not doing bad things but also about promoting the public good.