It’s telling that Randall started off the discussion by talking about the lag time between turning his finalized manuscript in to the publisher and seeing it in print. It’s a common problem in writing about computer technology; everything you want to say might go stale before you get the words out. It’s not a coincidence that Planet Google quotes so heavily from blogs, the new first responders of technology journalism. Nor is it a coincidence that the first three good books on Google — Planet Google, David’s The Google Story, and John Battelle’s The Search — were all written by journalists and are structured as thoughtful accumulations of individual pieces of reportage. Individual plot strands — like the Microsoft-Yahoo! deal Randall fretted about — may go out of date, but others remain relevant and interesting.

What I was most struck by in Planet Google was the strong sense of contingency. It’s easy to attribute to Google a single, overarching master plan. (The company’s own messianic sense of mission certainly doesn’t help matters, either.) Each new product seems like another brick in a carefully planned wall, and leads to fairly predictable debates over the good and the evil that walls can be used for. But Planet Google is a good reminder of how remarkably aimless Google can be.

My favorite detail in this vein was that Google’s AdSense — which places text ads on third-party websites — was in fact an outgrowth of the top-secret Gmail project. Paul Buchheit, one of Google’s crack engineers, pulled an all-nighter putting together a prototype that scanned the text of emails and chose ads on related topics. This proof-of-concept not only convinced Google to go ahead with ad-supported email, but led to the development and launch of AdSense over a year before Gmail itself went public. Today, AdSense is a license to print money, and yet its birth was essentially an accident.

I had a more wistful sense of what-might-have-been when reading Randall’s description of how Google Answers, launched in 2002, was allowed to wither on the vine. Users would post questions along with a price they’d pay for a good answer; interested experts could then post replies and collect the bounty if their responses were deemed good enough. Some of my friends did decently well for themselves as freelance researchers on Google Answers, and the site developed some of that elusive quality of, well, quality that Wikipedia was building up. For certain specialized topics, a Google Answers page was the best reference available on the web. But, as Randall explains, Google basically did nothing with the site after launching it, and in 2005, Yahoo! Answers substituted community spirit for pay and ate Google Answers’s lunch. The story makes for an interesting juxtaposition with Knol — Google’s failed Wikipedia-killer. Google seems not to have learned much from the Google Answers experience.

The Google Answers story also illustrates one of Planet Google’s running themes: how consistently wrong-footed Google seems to be when it comes to genuinely social technologies. Facebook is the Other in Planet Google: an up-and-coming competitor that’s at once exactly like Google and a symbol of everything Google rejects. Reading Randall’s descriptions of Google’s dithering over OpenSocial and social networks, it’s no surprise that Facebook is the dominant player here, not Google. Indeed, Google Lively, a bizarre hybrid of social network and virtual world, launched after Planet Google went to press and is already defunct.

And yet, for all its indecisiveness and and half-bungled ventures, Google has also proven supremely skilled at executing on a few fundamentally important jobs. It has the best secret sauce in the search business, bar none, and it has the most scalable IT infrastructure in the world (a point well-made in chapter 2). It’s also hard not to be blown away by the user interface on its core web applications. After Gmail and Google Maps launched, people spent months pulling apart the JavaScript they used to learn new tricks. Perhaps the right metaphor is the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings: the Eye of Google can have a very narrow focus, but its gaze is inhumanly penetrating.