When reading David A. Vise's "The Google Story," one cannot help but reflect, in a somewhat cheesy manner, on a quote from this year's blockbuster Batman Begins. Bruce Wayne's martial arts mentor and nemesis Henri Ducard says, "The will is everything. If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, you become something else entirely."

But what ideal did Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, pledge themselves to? Unlike their other wealthy dot-com counterparts, Page and Brin never pursued cash, wealth or general notoriety. They wanted only to create a product useful and part of people's everyday lives and more importantly, organize the world's incredible volume of information. And they did it.

Beginning in 1998's meeting of Page and Brin at Stanford as graduate students, Vise presents a strong message of how intelligence and initiative appropriately are rewarded. In addition, Vise also details all the many neat quirks that highlight Google's monumental rise to the top of corporate America.

For instance, Page and Brin's initial dislike for each other after their meeting at Stanford. "Fortunately Larry and Sergey quickly found each other, as well as a shared passion for jousting with an intellectually worthy adversary," Vise states. Other quirks include, the root of Google's name, googol, which the founders had accidentally misspelled. A googol, is the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes, and was meant to symbolize the search engine's immense power.

Vise also shows how the Google doodle, Google's occasionally redesigned logo, came to be after Page and Brin attended California's famous Burning Man festival. The early design was meant to show the Google office was empty and on vacation, and later became a signature Google element.

Perhaps most interesting about the Google story, is how Page and Brin stubbornly held onto their vision despite efforts to make them conform to venture capitalists and other outside forces.

When speaking of how Google CEO Eric Schmidt perceived the Google Guys, Vise states, "The more time [Schmidt] spent at Google, the more impressed he became with the culture they had created, and the clarity and sense of shared mission that pervaded the company."

In addition, it's also interesting to see where Google's heading in the future. Among other things, Google has been developing Google Print and working with geneticists. Even Brin has been found to joke about the possibility of Google expanding to areas where few could possibly even fathom.

"Why not improve the brain?" Brin asks in "The Google Story." "You would want a lot of compute power. Perhaps in the future, we can attach a little version of Google that you just plug into your brain. We'll have to develop stylish versions, but then you'd have all of the world's knowledge immediately available, which is pretty exciting."

Other than the general story of Google, the book also features several appendices including: 23 ways to use Google, an official Google Labs Aptitude Test (used to assess possible Google employees) and a Google financial scorecard that analyzes Google's explosive growth (In 1999, Google's sales resulted in $220,000; in 2004 sales resulted in $3.2 billion).

While Vise's tale of how the duo from Stanford established a product Vise argues could rival the Gutenberg's printing press itself, his exposition also is incredibly thorough since it nails every major event, as well as many events that may have not been so major.

What is most important about paging through Vise's work is the type of effect characters like Page and Brin can have on everyday citizens. I focused on how the duo's emphasis on vision and purpose was far more important than any other goal. In a business world often dictated by heightened pace and cutthroat tactics, it is refreshing to see how the Google Guys' dedication to a simple dream was more than enough to get by, and more precisely, more than enough to succeed.