Can we remember a world before Google? Better yet: Do we want to?

In 11 years, the company that started as the brainchild of two Stanford wunderkinds has transformed into a force whose power seems impossible to overstate. It's a savior and a spoiler, depending on whom you ask.

Google's now-undeniable power lends a cute sense of inevitability to the early portions of Ken Auletta's "Googled: The End of the World as We Know It," released yesterday by Penguin Press.

That subtitle? It's not hyperbole.

"Google disrupts the digital world, the world of the Internet, advertising, software, television, print, books, telephones -- the analog world as we know it," said Mr. Auletta in an interview with the Post-Gazette.

A New Yorker titan in the increasingly small world of media criticism, Mr. Auletta spent more than two years researching "Googled," which aims to be a definitive take on a company so ubiquitous that his undertaking seems impossible, or at least masochistic.

A significant portion of the book is dedicated to Google's history: from its star-aligned beginning in Stanford labs, its cool-kid ascension in Silicon Valley, its awkward advances with traditional media, and now its shaky dominance in an industry known for high highs and low lows.

Through it all, Mr. Auletta explores the inherent tension between the engineering sensibilities of Google's founders and the shifting priorities of a growing, public company.

One founder, Larry Page, has "zero charm," said Mr. Auletta, and will never combat any engineer stereotype. His partner, Sergey Brin, "can be a salesman," but still lives in the left-brain world of "pristine logic."

"Rousing your emotions is not something they're friendly to," Mr. Auletta said, so it's fascinating -- and still a little mysterious -- to read of their sessions with media moguls and venture capitalists looking to capitalize on the duo's unbeatable algorithm for search results.

Google is often described as a "disrupter," and Mr. Auletta's book dedicates as much attention to the disrupter as it does to the disrupted. His delivery seems to draw on Google's just-the-facts mentality, with significant portions relaying the company's history in a no-frills style colored by impressive reporting and access.

Some of those sections are fascinating, particularly his account of Google's early days. But as the company's narrative develops, parts of the story seem tired in their retelling, such as his account of Google's corporate tete-a-tete with book publishers over its Google Books scanning project.

Mr. Auletta's media expertise, though, is on full display as he diagnoses the problems facing traditional media outlets. Yet this is not another sobbing obituary for the hard-hit studios and newspapers.

Though he writes for a magazine long associated with an exhaustive process, Mr. Auletta offers little sympathy for the outlets who sit idly by while the emerging Internet companies stage a coup on the way we live now.

"This is the wild west," Mr. Auletta said, describing the current media landscape. "I'm almost overwhelmed by the problems facing the industry, but I'm not going to be a whiner."

And it seems by Mr. Auletta's account that Google has no time for whining.

Mr. Page and Mr. Brin struggle to maintain a laissez-faire attitude in the workplace while pesky things such as shareholders accompany their company's growth. Guiding them like a corporate sherpa is chief executive Eric Schmidt after Google's board of directors encourages some management help.

The three men preside over an invention that seems obvious in retrospect: a search that "did a link analysis, counting the sites that were most frequently visited by users and jumping them to the top of the search results," Mr. Auletta writes.

Foreshadowing their company's "Don't be evil" motto, Mr. Page and Mr. Brin refused to accept sponsoring from advertisers that would alter a link's rank.

That it took only 11 years for Google to go from a garage to its current state is a testament to the ingenuity and passion of its founders, but also because "what is fundamentally different is the speed of change in technology today," said Mr. Auletta.

But accompanying that accelerated change is a loss in institutional memory -- the before-Google world is hard to remember. But at one point, Netscape and Microsoft seemed unstoppable.

Every day is a brave new world these days, and some of this book's strongest moments come from his treatment of Google's potential down-the-road competitors.

"If I were Google, the project I would worry about is vertical search," he said.

Heralded as the future of search, vertical search engines serve niche specialties and usually offer experts for results. It's another hole in the market that newspapers -- with their bevy of resident experts -- failed to realize, Mr. Auletta said.

Vertical search can be taken a step further when integrated with social networking. Then, instead of information coming from an anonymous server somewhere, the feedback and answers are coming from Twitter followers or Facebook friends: people you trust, at least a little.

These capabilities are part of the reason Google unsuccessfully tried to acquire Twitter, which is yet another company that appeared overnight and then threatened the seemingly unassailable Google Goliath.

Though the definitive take, Mr. Auletta's book proves that nothing is definitive in Silicon Valley.

Exhibit A: Back in 1998, the Google guys lured top-notch employees with low pay but generous phantom stock offers. The staff masseuse decided to trade higher pay for such stock.

She's now a millionaire.

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