The Google Story ...describes the lava lamps, AstroTurf,beach volleyball, celebrity-caliber fried chicken and touch-pad-controlled toilets that have given Google's cloistered Googleplex campus in Mountain View, Calif., its much-vaunted PeterPan atmosphere.On a different note, The Google Story also includes an aerial view of the Googleplex taken from a B-24 bomber, with a machine gun visible in the foreground.Sunny or sinister? Either is a way to describe Google's fast, unstoppable rise.

Moscow-born Sergey Brin and Midwest-born Larry Page dropped out of graduate school at Stanford University to, in their own words, "change the world" through a powerful search engine that would organize every bit of information on the Web for free.The Google Story takes you deep inside the company's wild ride from an idea that struggled for funding in 1998 to a firm that rakes in billions in profits, making Brin and Page the wealthiest young men in America.Based on scrupulous research and extraordinary access to Google, this fast-moving narrative reveals how an unorthodox management style and culture of innovation enabled a search engine to shake up Madison Avenue and Wall Street, scoop up YouTube, and battle Microsoft at every turn.Not afraid of controversy, Google is expanding in Communist China and quietly working on a searchable genetic database,initiatives that test the founders' guiding mantra: DON'T BE EVIL.

Preface: Google Grows Up

Introduction

1. A Healthy Disregard for the Impossible

2. When Larry Met Sergey

3. Learning to Count

4. The Secret Sauce

5. Divide and Conquer

6. Burning Man

7. The Danny Sullivan Show

8. A Trickle

9. Hiring a Pilot

10. You've Got Google

11. The Google Economy

12. And on the Fifth Day

13. Global Goooogling

14. April Fools

15. Porn Cookie Guy

16. Going Public

17. Playboys

18. Charlie's Place

19. Space Race

20. A Legal Showdown.

21. A Virtual Library

22. Attacking Microsoft

23. Money Machine

24. The China Syndrome

25. Googling Your Genes

26. Rocket Man

Appendix I: 23 Google Search Tips

Appendix II: Google Labs Aptitude Test (GLAT)

Appendix III: Google's Financial Scorecard

A NOTE ON SOURCES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PHOTO CREDITS

INDEX