It wasn’t so long ago that all of Google fit into a two-car garage and a couple of spare rooms, with space enough for a few forlorn appliances and an unused ping-pong table. How did this tiny company with a quirky name become not only a verb but perhaps the most influential company on the planet in just a decade? Can it possibly achieve both its ambitious goals and its lofty ideals? These two questions frame “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It’’ by longtime New Yorker writer Ken Auletta. The answer to the first becomes vividly clear; the answer to the second haunts the author, and he tries to make it haunt us, with mixed success.
