Business Bookshelf: "I'm Feeling Lucky"

Your hankering for a book about the first five years of Google has been answered with the publication of "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59," by Douglas Edwards.

If this is the first book you've read about a Silicon Valley start-up, you may enjoy its charms. You'll learn about the company cafe, where the wonderful cuisine is free, about Super Soaker gunbattles, about eccentric but brilliant software engineers, about employee-bonding trips and massages in the workplace.

But Edwards' contributions to Google's rise are trifling, as is his book. After being hired, he realized he didn't really have that much to offer the unorthodox company, where Rollerblade hockey defines its freewheeling ethos.

So he aspired to become the company's "word guy." In that capacity, he devised the term AdWords for the company's paid-search term, devised the company's 2004 April Fool's joke about establishing a Google office on the moon, and came up with the phrase "Ads by GOOOOOOOGLE" to brand AdWords.

"I sometimes struggled with a single word choice for an hour and then spent days defending it," he writes.

Because a slew of journalists, most recently Ken Auletta and Steven Levy, have told the company's story in detail, "I'm Feeling Lucky" adds little to our understanding of Google's early years. Even the expectations set in the book's subtitle are never met. There are no "confessions" here, no dirty linen aired, no damning gossip shared. Its tone and substance wouldn't seem alien if dropped into a Google employee newsletter.

This could have been a terrific book. Edwards does have some talent with words. But his memoir fails to deliver because he either doesn't have much to say about his time at Google or he doesn't have the daring to rat out his enemies and friends with honest revelations about the place.

The best hope for this book is that Google engineers will write code to shrink 400-page books like this to their essence. "I Feel Lucky" would be twice as good if it were half as long.

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE