Business Books: Can Google live up to its motto?

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 25 - As Google Inc <GOOG.O> completes the first 10 years of its 300-year plan to organize all the world's information, are its ambitions compatible with its famous motto, "don't be evil"?

That is the question author Randall Stross seeks to answer in "Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know" (Free Press, $26).

Google's smarts pushed it ahead of Yahoo Inc as the world's favorite search engine. Its genius was working out how to make real money from this success -- by targeting advertisements based on a user's search.

"The very act of submitting a search term provides precise information about what a user is currently thinking about -- permitting a highly educated guess about the user's likely interest in an advertiser's product," writes Stross, a technology columnist and business professor at San Jose State University.

Targeted advertisements helped propel it from a tiny startup to its historic high valuation in November 2007 of $225 billion -- surpassing for a time established names like IBM and Cisco Systems.

Another Google success is Gmail, which gave users an unprecedented amount of space to store e-mail in return for the right to hit them with ads tailored to the contents of their mailboxes.

It has also challenged software company Microsoft Corp with its "cloud computing" concept, in which Google offers simple word processor, spreadsheet and browser programs, in return for being allowed to host all the user's documents and data.

For all its success, Google has made some missteps, according to Stross.

Just as Microsoft Corp <MSFT.O> watched Google capture the lucrative search business, Google in turn allowed privately owned Facebook to run away with social networking, Stross notes.

Google also never quite perfected its video clips service and ended up paying $1.65 billion to buy YouTube and is still struggling to sell ads and spin profits from the site.

A big setback grew out of its attempt to scan the world's 32 million books, which resulted in a lawsuit over copyright.

Stross also recalls the anger of Google co-founder Eric Schmidt when CNET published personal informatimon about him it discovered in a Google search. The company said it would stop cooperating with CNET journalists for a year but relented a month or so later.

Stross's book, which comes three years after the company's early history was chronicled in "The Search" by John Battelle, ends by examining Schmidt's boast that Google would organize the world's information in 300 years.

"Google's first 10 years of organizing the world's information has taken it a considerable distance. It may not need 290 years to complete its mission," Stross wrote.