Today, Google, the world’s largest search company, is formally making its pitch to become a major force in social networking. The product it’s announcing is called Google+, and observers might wonder whether it’s simply one more social effort by a company that has had a lousy track record in that field to date.

'On Facebook I overshare. On Twitter, I undershare. If Google hits that spot in the middle, we can revolutionize social interaction.'—Shimrit Ben-Yair, the product manager in charge of the social graph

Parts of it certainly seem to appear similar to what we've seen before. One significant component is a continuous scroll called "the Stream" that's an alternative to Facebook's news feed, a hub of personalized content. It has a companion called "Sparks," related to one's specified interests. Together they are designed to be a primary attention-suck of Google users—Google hopes that eventually people will gravitate to the stream in the same way that members of Facebook or Twitter constantly check those continuous scrolls of personalized information.

The second important app is Circles, an improved way to share information with one's friends, family, contacts, and the public at large. It's a management tool that's a necessary component of any social network—a way to organize (and recruit) fellow members of the service.

But as I learned in almost a year of following the project's development, with multiple interviews with the team and its executives, Google+ is not a typical release. Developed under the codename Emerald Sea, it is a result of a lengthy and urgent effort involving almost all of the company's products. Hundreds of engineers were involved in the effort. It has been a key focus for new CEO Larry Page.

The parts announced Tuesday represent only a portion of Google's plans. In an approach the company refers to as "rolling thunder," Google has been quietly pushing out pieces of its ambitious social strategy—there are well over 100 launches on its calendar. When some launches were greeted by yawns, the Emerald Sea team leaders weren't ruffled at all—lack of drama is part of the plan. Google has consciously refrained from contextualizing those products into its overall strategy.

That will begin now, with the announcement of the two centerpieces of Google+. But even this moment—revealed in a blog post that marks the first limited "field tests" outside the company—will be muted, because it marks just one more milestone in a long tough slog to remake Google into something more "people centric."

"We're transforming Google itself into a social destination at a level and scale that we've never attempted—orders of magnitude more investment in terms of people than any previous project," says Vic Gundotra, who leads Google's social efforts.

Some think the battle is already lost. Bloggers and critics opine that social software just isn't in Google's DNA. Google is all about algorithms, they say, not interactions between humans. And where's Larry Page's Facebook profile? (Sergey Brin does have one, under a pseudonym that unmistakably points to its owner.)

But Googlers working on Emerald Sea note that the company has a lot advantages to play on the fields of social networking. Hundreds of millions of users, the vast majority of whom trust the company. Unparalleled mastery of determining relevant information. A vault filled with cash, to buy small companies (Aardvark, Picnik, Slide) that have gained a foothold in a given social activity.

To grasp the significance of this for Google, you must get past a corporate quarantine and catch a glimpse of the giant hand-painted mural that greets those very few visitors granted access to the fourth floor of Building 2000 on the Google campus, which was an early hub of the initiative.

The mural has been there for a year now. On first glance, the artwork, on a wall facing the two elevators, is a frightening mash up of a J.M.W. Turner painting and a storyboard for a scene from The Perfect Storm. It depicts a tumescent oceanscape, dominated by a wall of surf that is about to upturn a pitiful sailing ship.

'We needed a code name that captured the fact that either there was a great opportunity to sail to new horizons and new things, or that we were going to drown by this wave.' —Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President of Social for Google

The image was discovered by Google VP of product management Bradley Horowitz when he opened Google Image Search and typed "Emerald Sea"—which had just been chosen as the project code name. The first result, a depiction of an 1878 painting created by German immigrant artist Albert Bierstadt, so impressed Horowitz that he commissioned a pair of art students to copy it on the wall facing the fourth floor elevators. That way, the hundreds of workers contributing to Emerald Sea would draw inspiration as they headed to their computers to remake Google into a major social networking force.

The massive wave symbolizes the ways Google views the increasingly prominent social aspect of the Web—as a possible tsunami poised to engulf it, or a maverick surge that it will ride to glory. Beirstadt's turbulent vision is the perfect illustration. "We needed a code name that captured the fact that either there was a great opportunity to sail to new horizons and new things, or that we were going to drown by this wave," Gundotra, said last August, when Google first showed me a prototype.

Did he say drown? It almost beggars belief that the king of the search—the most successful Internet business ever, with $30 billion in yearly revenue—would be running scared by the social networking trend led by Facebook, a company that barely rakes in a few billion. Nonetheless, people at Google feel that retooling to integrate the social element isn't a luxury. It's a necessity. As early as last August, I asked Gundotra whether he felt Emerald Sea was a bet-the-company project.

"I think so," he replied. "I don't know how you can look at it any other way."

Google still wants to organize the world's information. But this time, it's personal.

Google has a checkered history in social software. In some respects, it has been a pioneer; its social networking site Orkut debuted worldwide in January 2004, a month before Facebook first poked the Harvard community. But Google failed to capitalize on early enthusiasm, and aside from capturing massive market shares in Brazil and India, Orkut is now a footnote.

In 2007, Google spearheaded a consortium to create an open standard for social network applications called Open Social. It fell short of its goals, largely because the true standard setter in social, Facebook, withheld its cooperation. In 2009, a thrilling demo at Google's I/O conference introduced the social-based communications system Wave with a bang—but confusion about how to use the product dissipated the enthusiasm. Google waved goodbye to the product last summer.

Also in 2009, Google attempted to crack the social world with a product called Buzz, integrating some aspects of Facebook and Twitter into Gmail. Buzz's innovations never had a chance to win an audience, as privacy flaws in the product's initial design generated an Internet firestorm. (Buzz instantly created a social network from one's contacts, sometimes revealing connections that users wanted to keep on the down low.) The glitch confirmed a growing suspicion that Google was a scary company that had too much personal information about its users.

The Buzz disaster came just as Facebook began to look like it may make good on its goal of signing up every human on the planet—creating a treasure trove of information inaccessible to Google's servers. People at Google began to worry that Facebook could even leverage the information its users shared to create a people-centric version of search that in some cases could deliver more useful results than Google's crown jewel of a search engine.

In March 2010, only a month after the Buzz debacle, Google's head of operations Urs Hölzle—an early employee who had been instrumental in setting up Google's Brobdingnagian data operations—decided to kick-start a new effort. In an e-mail alarum evoking Bill Gates's legendary 1995 Internet Tidal Wave missive to Microsofties, Hölzle acknowledged that the fundamental way people use the Internet has changed.

No longer could Google operate without making its products more personal. The social challenge required decisive and substantial response within Google. He proposed a sort of social-graph Manhattan Project, and in true Google style, crunched some of the numbers by which engineers should be allocated to the project. His memo became known as the Urs-Quake.