The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

 

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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 338.761025040973
EAN: 9781591840886
ISBN: 1591840880
Label: Portfolio Hardcover
Manufacturer: Portfolio Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 320
Publication Date: 2005-09-08
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Studio: Portfolio Hardcover

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What does the world want? According to John Battelle, a company that answers that question -- in all its shades of meaning -- can unlock the most intractable riddles of both business and culture. And for the past few years, that's exactly what Google has been doing.

Jumping into the game long after Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, and other pioneers, Google offered a radical new approach to search, redefined the idea of viral marketing, survived the dotcom crash, and pulled off the largest and most talked about initial public offering in the history of Silicon Valley.

But The Search offers much more than the inside story of Google's triumph. It's also a big-picture book about the past, present, and future of search technology, and the enormous impact it is starting to have on marketing, media, pop culture, dating, job hunting, international law, civil liberties, and just about every other sphere of human interest.

More than any of its rivals, Google has become the gateway to instant knowledge. Hundreds of millions of people use it to satisfy their wants, needs, fears, and obsessions, creating an enormous artifact that Battelle calls "the Database of Intentions." Somewhere in Google's archives, for instance, you can find the agonized research of a gay man with AIDS, the silent plotting of a would-be bombmaker, and the anxiety of a woman checking out her blind date. Combined with the databases of thousands of other search-driven businesses, large and small, it all adds up to a goldmine of information that powerful organizations (including the government) will want to get their hands on.

No one is better qualified to explain this entire phenomenon than Battelle, who cofounded Wired and founded The Industry Standard. Perhaps more than any other journalist, he has devoted his career to finding the holy grail of technology -- something as transformational as the Macintosh was in the mid- 1980s. And he has finally found it in search.

Battelle draws on more than 350 interviews with major players from Silicon Valley to Seattle to Wall Street, including Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt, as well as competitors like Louis Monier, who invented AltaVista, and Neil Moncrief, a soft-spoken Georgian whose business Google built, destroyed, and built again.

Battelle lucidly reveals how search technology actually works, explores the amazing power of targeted advertising, and reports on the frenzy of the Google IPO, when the company tried to rewrite the rules of Wall Street and declared "don't be evil" as its corporate motto.

For anyone who wants to understand how Google really succeeded -- and the implications of a world in which every click can be preserved forever -- THE SEARCH is an eye-opening and indispensable read.

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Way better than the Long Tail
Review: Great book, well written, entertaining and thought provoking.
This is the book on the Internet in the 2000's that should have got all
the attention that 'The Long tail' book got.

I read the authors blog most days now.
I hope he updates this book with a new edition, I'd buy that for sure.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: totally missed the boat
Review: The author makes a horrendous error: Look in the index for the word "data mining". It shows that "data mining" is discussed on page 33. Wrong! There is no mention of data mining in the book at all. Any book that talks about Google yet fails to mention data mining is absolutely worthless. That's pretty much the WHOLE POINT of Google. They acquire data from users and use that data to direct advertising at people. They study patterns in data. That's how they make money. Author = FAIL.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: If you're searching for a fascinating read, The Search is it!
Review: Conventional wisdom states that the company that is first to a new market, usually has an insurmountable competitive advantage; however, that logic simply gets turned on its head regarding issues of the Internet. By all accounts, Google was a laggard to the Internet party - well behind pioneers such as Lycos, Excite, AltaVista and Yahoo!. But Google offered a truly disruptive technological innovation that reshuffled and restacked the cards in its favor. Not only did Google survive the dot-com implosion of the early 2000s, it went on to change how we use the Internet and - frankly - the world as we know it. The book titled - The Search - by author John Battelle goes beyond the traditional "rags-to-riches" saga of the companies co-founders and offers a comprehensive look at the technology that makes Internet search possible as well as its inescapable impact on nearly every aspect of our lives. Soundview recommends this book because it is based on interviews of more than 350 people at Google, as well as those who compete with Google, to provide an interesting 360 degree perspective of this fascinating company. Google has become a truly "can't-live-without-it" application, and this book offers a front row seat at how that happened as well as what the future holds for online searches.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Read this book
Review: I originally read this book from the library and was moved to buy it as a gift. While this book is a history of Google, it also gives a thought provoking discussion of how our brains work. The whole concept of "search" is presented so that anyone can understand how search engines (including our brains) operate and how this knowledge informs those who are writing these engines. It's a bit scary to realize that computer programs are tailoring every interaction we have with a computer in the hope that our experience will be what the programmer thinks is our desire. From the articles which appear on the home pages of places like MSN to the suggestions for other purchases on Amazon, someone is second guessing our every move. What ever happened to serendipity? All in all a fascinating read.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: great survey of Google's implications, decent survey of search history
Review: This book give some insights into how Google has affected the world (mostly positive, but some negative as well)
As a history of Google, this book tells us a lot, from inception to post-IPO.
It also explains the histories of some of the earlier defunct search engines.

For someone looking for some general knowledge about the search industry, this book would be very good.

Writing style is somewhat informal but makes for quicker reading.

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