Steven Levy: “Engineering prowess famously catapulted the 14-year-old search giant into its place as one of the world’s most successful, influential, and frighteningly powerful companies. Its constantly refined search algorithm changed the way we all access and even think about information. Its equally complex ad-auction platform is a perpetual money-minting machine. But other, less well-known engineering and strategic breakthroughs are arguably just as crucial to Google’s success: its ability to build, organize, and operate a huge network of servers and fiber-optic cables with an efficiency and speed that rocks physics on its heels. Google has spread its infrastructure across a global archipelago of massive buildings—a dozen or so information palaces in locales as diverse as Council Bluffs, Iowa; St. Ghislain, Belgium; and soon Hong Kong and Singapore—where an unspecified but huge number of machines process and deliver the continuing chronicle of human experience.”