Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin

NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - When Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin declared in their IPO prospectus "don't be evil" as a modus operandi and vowed to ignore short-term results, the Securities and Exchange Commission wasn't pleased. The manifesto was too folksy for such an important document, and the SEC even asked the Google Guys to consider not referring to executives and directors by their first names. Larry and Sergey refused. Google went public anyway. The rest is history.

And what an astoundingly large amount of history there is, considering that the company began just seven years ago as the outgrowth of doctoral research the founders did at Stanford University. The yarn of how Google grew from just another Internet search engine into the beast of a company worth more than $100 billion today is well told in a straightforward, if largely unsurprising, new book by Washington Post reporter David Vise. "The Google Story: Inside the Hottest Business, Media and Technology Success of Our Time" is essentially Google for beginners. If you slavishly follow the search industry and its daily permutations, you've probably already picked up John Battelle's authoritative and analytical book, "The Search." For the uninitiated, Vise's book is a thorough primer on everything from the childhoods of the founders to its battles with Microsoft and its impact on the advertising industry.

There's little original reporting in "The Google Story." Instead, Vise relies heavily upon, and gives credit to, the work of many other publications, including FORTUNE magazine. (An exception: The SEC anecdote above came from Freedom of Information Act requests he cleverly filed.) As such, this book will make you very well informed about Google without exactly putting you on a first-name basis with its executives. For that, you'll have to read the company's securities filings.

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