Considering the ongoing skirmishes going on right now between Amazon and Google over digital book publishing, it’s more than ironic that Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos was one of only a few initial investors in the search giant.

But–in one of the many interesting details in New Yorker author Ken Auletta’s new book, “Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It”–it was indeed Bezos who invested $250,000 in the start-up in 1998 at four cents a share.

(Some previous reports have had it at six cents a share and at a $100,000 level.)

Three of the others, according to Auletta, all of whom ponied up the same amount, were Stanford University computer science professor David Cheriton, entrepreneur Ram Shriram and Sun Microsystems (JAVA) co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim.

Later, more angels invested in Google (GOOG), followed by the big $25 million venture round by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital in mid-1999.

While it was known back when Google went public in 2004 that Bezos held about three million shares in the IPO (Auletta said it was precisely 3.3 million shares), the book has a lot of the details about the meeting between him and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the Menlo Park, Calif., garage of current Google exec Susan Wojcicki.

He had been brought there, according to the book, by Shriram, who had sold his company, Junglee, to Amazon (AMZN) in 1998.

“I just fell in love with Larry and Sergey,” Bezos told Auletta in an interview–not that there’s anything wrong with that considering the flip-flop relationships of Silicon Valley.

He’d presumably be more in love–and less inclined to be fighting Google, first in search with A9 and now in online publishing–if he had held onto those shares.

That stock would be worth $1.6 billion today.

But a spokesman for Amazon declined to comment on what Bezos did with his Google stake, noting it was a personal investment.

Interestingly, Bezos is also an early investor in the current hotsy-totsy microblogging start-up, Twitter.

A part of Auletta’s book, which is slated to come out Nov. 3, is in this week’s New Yorker in an excerpt called “Searching for Trouble.” It is, oddly, not available online.

In any case, the piece is mostly about the various ways Brin and Page dissed big media moguls, figuratively (destroying old media advertising business models) and literally (showing up at meetings sweaty and wearing skates and gym shorts).

Good thing they never did that to Bezos.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Internet navigation browser plug-in maker Cooliris, which lets users “see” media on the Web in a more visual manner, has gotten $15.5 million in additional funding from its investors.

The new round includes Kleiner Perkins, Cooliris’s initial investor, as well as DAG Ventures, the Westly Group and T-Mobile’s T-Ventures.

Cooliris had already received $3 million two years ago from Kleiner.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based start-up is also releasing the latest upgrade to its 3-D “wall” software out of beta, which adds more online content from around the Web, including from social-networking sites like Facebook and from a user’s own hard drive.

The trend toward making the Web browser look like a television screen and navigating information more visually is increasing all over the Internet, from video services like Boxee to visually-oriented search services like Searchme.

“We’re trying to allow users to discover, navigate and consume more of the Web in the same amount of time, using visual means, than people do now through text links,” said Austin Shoemaker, Cooliris co-founder and CTO in an interview last week with BoomTown.

Launched last year with a plug-in called PicLens, Cooliris said that its software had been downloaded 10 million times and that it has three million active daily users. It also has a popular iPhone version of its software.

Here are two more Cooliris screenshots like the one above (click on any of them to make them larger):

Earlier this week, I visited Dash Navigation, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based car-navigation device start-up that is being backed to the tune of $42 million by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.

There, I got a look at the new GPS device called the Dash Express that went on sale exclusively on Amazon (AMZN) today and was also reviewed by my esteemed colleague Walt Mossberg (Cliff Notes on that: he liked it a lot, but it’s not perfect, although he thinks the $400 Dash signifies a leap ahead in the arena).

A longtime user of such devices–make that a longtime disgruntled user–I have always been annoyed that car navigation has been so removed from the digital and connected revolution taking place everywhere else.

Being able to grab information from the Web and also send it to a device seems an obvious move, so I am glad someone has made it. I am also interested in Dash’s use of devices to help inform the whole system about traffic problems, which will presumably work better as more Dash devices are on the road.

In fact, I am in Los Angeles right now–the epicenter of traffic congestion–and I brought a Dash unit to see how well that works. And I also sent a map of the hot spots from the HBO series, “Entourage.” First stop for breakfast after avoiding traffic on Fairfax: Canter’s, the very funky deli the “boys” get food from.

My review: The knishes were delicious and I was not annoyed either, since I was not stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic getting to them.

Here’s a video I did while visiting Dash’s HQ earlier this week: