Douglas Edwards joined Google in 1999 as employee No. 59, and lived through some of its early developmental steps, including the creation of the Google Doodle and Gmail. Something of an outsider in a culture dominated by engineers, Edwards helped the company develop what he calls "a human voice," and stayed through the company's eventual IPO.

He left in 2005, and after writing about his experiences on his blog, Xooglers, he decided it was time to write a book. The result is "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59" [Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, out today].

"It took me a long time to realize that I had to write the book," Edwards said in an interview at The Wall Street Journal offices. "Every time I [go] online, I see Google's logo. Every time I open the newspaper, I read about Google. Every time I turn on the TV, Google Google Google. I'm thinking, all these stories in my head. So finally I decided I've got to get this out of my head and on to paper."

What are you most proud of -- the fact that you wrote the line, "Not the Usual Yada Yada," or that AdWords is named after you?

Boy, that's a tough call. I think I'm proudest of the fact that I helped give Google a human voice. The yada yada thing carried a lot of importance to me because it really said that we're going to set a tone for how we communicate with users that's going to be unlike other companies. Everybody else buried all the ugly details in the end user license agreement and I said, we're not going to do that. I was really proud that the company supported that because it wasn't immediately evident that just because I had written it, we would do it. But they supported that and they allowed me to put that language on the site.