Search & Destroy: Why You Can't Trust Google Inc.

This book is a polemic. Styling himself as “the world's leading Google critic” in his dust jacket bio, Scott Cleland certainly has an ax to grind. Sadly, his points about Google's bad side get lost in vitriol, absurd jumps in reasoning in lieu of logic and misinterpretation of many of his sources make the book almost unreadable. It took me multiple tries to get through the book because it is so badly written. It is repetitive enough that the author could have covered the material in half the space or less. There is an attempt at organization in the chapter titles, but the contents of the chapters frequently has nothing to do with the titled subject.

Truly a disappointment of a book and for Mr. Cleland, a missed opportunity to raise some valid concerns over privacy and other societal issues and Google's unique profile as an Internet company. Written in 2011, there is some foresight about the directions the web is taking, but those issues are far from unique to Google. And although there is a wealth of material, key sources like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (https://eff.org) and others with similar privacy concerns are never mentioned.