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

But The Search offers much more than the inside story of Google’s triumph. It’s a big- picture book about the past, present, and future of search technology and the enormous impact it’s starting to have on marketing, media, pop culture, dating, job hunting, international law, civil liberties, and just about every other sphere of human interest. BACKCOVER: “The Search is a superb story, well written and feverishly researched. Whether you are a student, techie, business executive, budding visionary or just enjoy pop culture, this is a book not to be missed.”
—USA Today

“John Battelle is Silicon Valley’s Bob Woodward. One of the founders of Wired magazine, he has hung around Google for so long that he has come to be as close as any outsider can to actually being an insider….The result is a highly readable account of Google’s astonishing rise.”
—The Economist

“It’s a fascinating story, and Mr. Battelle… tells it well.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“A surprisingly gripping story…The Search yields impressive results, pairing a reportorial eye for detail with an evangelical zeal to help readers understand the import of the search revolution.”
—Wired News

“Battelle…manages to keep things compelling, adding his own trenchant analysis about what Google’s rapid evolution and powerful technology might mean for the company and our society as whole.”
—The Associated Press

“A compelling glimpse of the search industry’s early years.”
—BusinessWeek

“Deeply researched and nimbly reported.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Indispensable.”
—London Review of Books

“John Battelle has written a brilliant business book, but he’s also done something more: he’s used the amazing saga of Google to explore what it means to search. All searchers should read it.”
—Walter Isaacson, CEO of the Aspen Institute; former editor of Time; former CEO of CNN

“Nobody, and I mean nobody, has thought longer, harder, or smarter about Google and the search business than John Battelle. If you want to understand the rise of the search economy and culture, you need to read this book.”
—John Heilemann, author of Pride Before the Fall

Amazon.com
If you pick your books by their popularity--how many and which other people are reading them--then know this about The Search: it's probably on Bill Gates' reading list, and that of almost every venture capitalist and startup-hungry entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. In its sweeping survey of the history of Internet search technologies, its gossip about and analysis of Google, and its speculation on the larger cultural implications of a Web-connected world, it will likely receive attention from a variety of businesspeople, technology futurists, journalists, and interested observers of mid-2000s zeitgeist.

This ambitious book comes with a strong pedigree. Author John Battelle was a founder of The Industry Standard and then one of the original editors of Wired, two magazines which helped shape our early perceptions of the wild world of the Internet. Battelle clearly drew from his experience and contacts in writing The Search. In addition to the sure-handed historical perspective and easy familiarity with such dot-com stalwarts as AltaVista, Lycos, and Excite, he speckles his narrative with conversational asides from a cast of fascinating characters, such Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin; Yahoo's, Jerry Yang and David Filo; key executives at Microsoft and different VC firms on the famed Sandhill road; and numerous other insiders, particularly at the company which currently sits atop the search world, Google.

The Search is not exactly the corporate history of Google. At the book's outset, Battelle specifically indicates his desire to understand what he calls the cultural anthropology of search, and to analyze search engines' current role as the "database of our intentions"--the repository of humanity's curiosity, exploration, and expressed desires. Interesting though that beginning is, though, Battelle's story really picks up speed when he starts dishing inside scoop on the darling business story of the decade, Google. To Battelle's credit, though, he doesn't stop just with historical retrospective: the final part of his book focuses on the potential future directions of Google and its products' development. In what Battelle himself acknowledges might just be a "digital fantasy train", he describes the possibility that Google will become the centralizing platform for our entire lives and quotes one early employee on the weightiness of Google's potential impact: "Sometimes I feel like I am on a bridge, twenty thousand feet up in the air. If I look down I'm afraid I'll fall. I don't feel like I can think about all the implications."

Some will shrug at such words; after all, similar hype has accompanied other technologies and other companies before. Many others, though, will search Battelle's story for meaning--and fast. --Peter Han

---

All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Semantic Search is Coming, 2008-06-29
I found "The Search" captivating. Partly this could because of my long time fascination with the Internet and part of it because of my marketing mind. It tells of the cat and mouse game of spammers and how Google tries to outwit them (sometimes hurting innocent marketers at the same time).

I loved the section on the future of search. Ideally we want a search that gives us what we are thinking about - not just what we say we want. This is about filtering, presentation and understanding.

It has a whole section on Semantic Web which is another area I am fascinated with.

Highly recommend the book if you like thinking about the future and if you like marketing.




0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Secret to Google's success, 2008-05-25
I have always wondered how Google made so much money from Advertising alone. This book helped me answer that question. BTW, I have recently changed the job from being a moribund corporate IT developer to being an engineer at Google. Reading this book was my first attempt at understanding my employer.


1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Search - The Future of Technology, 2008-02-04
This book provides an interesting history of Internet search technology with an emphasis on Google. The book also highlights how search engines and the Internet have rapidly changed and offers insights into where search technology may be heading next. There is no doubt that Google has gone from obscurity to, in some ways, the envy of the world in a matter of a decade. But time will tell as to whether it can maintain its dominance.
The author points out that search is the key to the future of technology - the ability to answer one's questions on any subject at the speed of a click in addition to anticipating and exposing searchers to products and ideas they did not even know they were looking for is clearly where we are headed. Search has leapt off our computer screen and has now invaded our cell phones and handheld devices. At the rate the industry is changing, Battelle would be wise to begin a supplemental book in a few more years to capture a behind the scenes look at the fast-changing world we now live in as well as its implications, both good and bad.


1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Lack Neutrality & Contain Explicity Language, 2008-02-02

3/4 of this book is about the rise and the criticisms of Google.

John Battelle barracked negative criticisms at Google throughout most of the chapters. Opposed to its advertised contents on the history of Search, John Battelle's book situates itself in a shocking polarized position. For good examples of authors who respect neutrality and who trust readers to establish their own opinions, I recommend you take a look at:

China Shakes the World: A Titan's Rise and Troubled Future -- and the Challenge for America by James Kynge and

The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works--and How It's Transforming the American Economy by Charles Fishman

The stellar books above (just check the awards they won) accomplished a high degree of professionalism that is so lacking in John Battelle's. Kynge and Fishman give insights to their subjects through sometimes difficultly gathered first-hand sources. Going beyond, they provide sufficient backgrounds on the rise of Chinese economy and WalMart, always remaining silent observers (they don't opinions) but at the same time, highlighting importantly facts and hinting at what might be the ways to look at the two's future. They allow you, the reader, to judge for yourself the pros and cons for the issues at hand. These books are the kind that makes you *think*. Oppositely, Battelle's The Search jumps from one fact after another about Google, each followed by criticisms, and then a positive anecdote about Google followed by more negative comments and followed by more criticisms... and as other readers have commented, the "facts" Battelle make arguments about in his book are web clips and not first-hand sources.

Mingled in between those internet cut-and-paste, why is the book still filled with so many blunt factual errors? To list just a few:

On pp49-50 : "...googol ... meant 1 followed by 100 zeros." -- What???
On pp76 : "...Google, after googol, the term for the number 1 followed by *100* [My highlight] zeros" -- so I didn't misread earlier.
On pp76 : "...mathematical equivalent of e, a concept ... well known to serious math geeks..." - "serious math geeks"??? No New York high school students, and that was back in 2002, 3 years before the book's publication, could have taken the SAT's and entered colleges above SUNY Stony Brook without knowing the *irrational number* "e" to three digits.

And why John Battelle put in so many instances of extreme languages? As substitutions for emoticons that illustrate his anger/incredulity??

On pp 96 : "... every one of his investors f**k-you rich..."
On pp 170 : "... $300 for a f**king stroller..."
On pp 189 : "...Who the h**l does [Google] think it is?"

Engineers, scientists and policy makers... don't waste your money and time on this one.

One star for the flow of paragraphs and the organization.

End of my rant.



1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Larry and Sergey's Excellent Adventure, 2007-08-25
A very well-researched and well-written book. Most notable is author John Battelle's getting the essence of just how bad search was until the Google Guys came along and nailed the concept. Battelle recounts how major players in the IT industry assumed search was as good as it was going to get circa 1997 - 2000 (and it really s-cked in retrospect), so they went off trying to become traffic and portal sites. [Larry Page archly notes that Yahoo and Excite had 'really good horoscopes' on their home pages. Touché.]

Meanwhile, Battelle recounts how Page and Brin set out with their 'Backrub' project at Stanford to solve search and transform it into what it is today. While Google is taken as a given today, Battelle takes us all back to that moment when we all first used Google and had that "Oh. My. God." moment.

The insider-ish stuff about Page and Brin is fascinating. I could read 500 pages of that stuff alone. It's a thrilling ride from cramped offices at Stanford to the Googleplex. 400,000 percent (!) revenue growth over five years is difficult to fathom, but Battelle gets as close to anyone to the essence of how that happened.

It's nice to see the chapter here about Bill Gross of Idealab. The original incarnation of Google AdWords was a blatant copy of Idealab's Goto.com (later named Overture) incubation.

Price is accurate as of the date/time indicated. Prices and product availability are subject to change. Any price displayed on the Amazon website at the time of purchase will govern the sale of this product.