| Book by Category | |  | E-Commerce | Home » » » The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture | | | | | | | Description: | | 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. | | | Product Details: | | | Author:
| John Battelle | | Paperback:
| 336 pages | | Publisher:
| Portfolio Trade | | Publication Date:
| October 03, 2006 | | Package Length:
| 8.2 inches | | Package Width:
| 5.5 inches | | Package Height:
| 0.9 inches | | Package Weight:
| 0.6 pounds | | Average Customer Rating:
|  based on 106 reviews |
| | | | Customer Reviews: | |
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 Good read for Internet Marketers beginners...Oct 13, 2009
If you are starting in internet marketing or just want to get to know how nowadays search engine landscape has become possible this is the book for you ...
 Good introduction to GoogleJul 26, 2009
This book at its core is primarily about Google - the fastest growing company ever - but the author's aim is to increase awareness of the significance of web search services: how widely they are used, and the possible consequences for society. Web search is a key to discovering (or recovering) valuable information scattered across a huge and ever changing internet. Captured search information has value to researchers and marketers, and to the extent that search engines drive traffic to sites they are valued by the owners of those sites. As of 2004 more than 65 million Americans were averaging more than thirty searches a month, and that number was growing 20% a year. The author describes in detail how search engines work and how they evolved: from DEC's AltaVista, to Lycos and Excite, to Google's PageRank algorithm based on citations.
Ironically in the late '90s major destination sites were focused on keeping visitors on their own content pages so they could charge e-commerce providers for partnership deals, rather than providing a search service so users could go elsewhere. Hence Google was able to make its start as a service provider to Netscape and Yahoo. It was not until 2002, however, that Google adopted auction and pay-per-click advertising, as pioneered by its competitor Overture, then beat Overture at its own game by replacing it as a partner to AOL.
Pay-per-click advertising has proved a compelling value for customer aquisition, resulting in a search engine optimization (SEO) industry that uses techniques - appropriate, inappropriate, and borderline - to boost the rankings of e-commerce sites. Revenue at Google soared over five years by a stunning 400,000% and the company went public in 2004 in an idosyncratic but ultimately successful IPO.
In addition to Google's history the author also discusses privacy concerns, given that the company has the ability to retain all searches performed by an individual, but that it must accommodate national governments, be it China or the US authorities seeking information using the PATRIOT act. In addition there is a wider society impact when public information, for example about court cases are easily accessible by anyone such as prospective employers.
Apart from the occasionally overwrought digression the book is dense with details and provides an excellent introduction to Google and the history behind it.
Way better than the Long TailMay 22, 2009
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.
0 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 totally missed the boatMay 05, 2009
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.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
If you're searching for a fascinating read, The Search is it!Mar 27, 2009
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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