Letting go of a book manuscript is hard. It's especially hard when the book's principal subject is a company whose every twitch is widely regarded as newsworthy and it feels as if at any moment a news story will break that will render entire chunks of the book instantly obsolete. For Planet Google, I held on just as long as possible, far beyond what was reasonable to ask of my publisher. In June, when the last window for very, very, very final editing would close, I was still futzing over such things as whether Google would purchase Digg or Microsoft would revive negotiations with Yahoo.

Boy, that was pretty pointless. Today, we stare across a bleak economic landscape, with a global economy that has seized up, scary unemployment numbers, worries that a severe recession could become still worse, and our attention fixed hopefully on Inauguration Day. Back in September, after my fingers had been pried off of the manuscript, the landscape changed. In the week separating Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and Planet Google's arrival at bookstores, no Google story broke and nothing about Google's narrative had changed in any obvious way. But the context had...

In telling the story of Google's pursuit of its ambition to organize the world's information, I presented the gamut of perspectives, ranging from those who see Google's services as the apotheosis of information technology's world-changing potential to those who see the accretion of unregulated power that threatens to reach a scale never before witnessed.

I offered an occasional opinion about controversial matters, sometimes taking Google's side, and sometimes not, but I did not build the book around a clearly stated view of Google as distinctly positive or distinctly negative. To me, the story seemed decidedly mixed, and I continue to see complications that keep me from declaring a handy summarizing view.

In any case, with the change in the economic landscape, Google's ability to pursue its long-term objective to organize all the world's information---and I do emphasize the "all"----will be curbed as the downturn in advertising will affect the company's core business, slowing the addition of new categories of information to its storehouses if expansion is costly. Search advertising may do better than other kinds of advertising in this recession, as Google claims, but being hurt less does not mean it won't be hurt at all. The company clearly is looking for ways to curb expenses---such as dropping contract employees and consolidating office space---to help it get through the rough weather ahead.

Planet Google concludes with CEO Eric Schmidt's estimate that it would take the company 300 years to fulfill its ambition to organize all the world's information. With a timeline measured in increments of centuries, the recession of 2008-20?? may prove to be nothing more than a tiny blip. But we're living within that blip right now, and without an end in sight, it doesn't seem tiny. And as long as the recession seems to be deepening and unemployment climbing, a debate about, say, how many months Google should retain the IP addresses associated with search histories, just doesn't seem as pressing as it once did.

The new Administration has a very, very long list of issues that cry out for immediate attention, and I don't wish to add another one to the pile. But there is one Google-related question that we will have to face sometime: Should government restrain Google's growing natural monopoly in search?