Googled, By Ken Auletta

The view from the Google campus at Mountain View changes all the time. Co-founder Larry Page now takes the reins as CEO from Eric Schmidt, who guided student wizards Page and Sergey Brin along the way towards a monster corporation.

Given this ongoing revolution, Ken Auletta fashions as near a definitive history as possible of the first dozen years of the search tool-turned-global data behemoth. (It might have been BackRub – or Whatbox.)

Though Google's don't-be-evil ethos has taken knocks from censorship to book digitisation, he shows how swiftly it re-boots. Yet it remains an overgrown adolescent in thrall to "the power and precariousness of a culture shaped by... founders". Auletta will have updating tasks for some time to come.