The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
24th March 2006 by Sean
| Author: John Battelle |  |
I have to admit that I am a bit of a google-phile. I like a lot of their products and a lot of the way they do business, so my overview may seem a bit positively biased. The book isn’t just a biography of the rise of Google though. It is more an examination of search, how it has changed our culture and uses Google (obviously) as the rat to study.
Battelle introduces a term he calls “Database of Intentions, which is the sum total of all queries that pour into search engines daily, revealing the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of our culture.” It is obvious in the book that Battelle is more interested in search in an anthropological sense more than Google itself, though a lion’s share of the book is focused on Google. He has a great blog about search that can be found here.
You can also get it on audiobook here.
What Fractals of Change says in a great review of the book.
Battelle is very good on future vulnerabilities of Google; some of these are:
- It’s unusual top-executive triumvirate
- All the usual problems of hypergrowth
- Reconciliation of responsibility to make money for stock holders with its “Don’t be Evil” motto
- Innovating in the face of relentless competition
- Clickfraud
- Increased government seizure of user-specific search date leading to a general reluctance to use a search engine and leave a click stream behind
- The possibility of a successful suit against Google’s practice of selling trademarked terms as AdWords
What spikemagazine.com says
John Battelle’s The Search is more than just a potted history of Google, although that company looms large throughout his book; rather, it’s a book which takes stock of Google’s giddy rise, the search engine wars between Google, Yahoo! and MSN, and the arrival of online contextual advertising which has irrevocably changed the nature of advertising itself.