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

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.

Amazon.com Review
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

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

Great book, 2008-11-19
The Search by John Battelle provides an interesting history of Internet search technology with a heavy emphasis on Google. It also highlights how search engines and the Internet have rapidly changed and offers insight into where search technology may be heading next. Although there is a heavy emphasis Google, the book ultimately aims at the bigger picture: the past, present, and future of search, in both the business and technology aspects.

John Battelle does a great job at giving a detailed overview of the role of Search, which is especially helpful for a person like me, who has a very limited knowledge of this topic. In addition, having a strong business and technical background, Battelle is even able to get a lot of insider information to further support his ideas. For example, he is able to incorporate his interviews with people like Brin and Page at Google, Bezos at Amazon, Yang and Filo at Yahoo, etc. Not to mention, he even brings the lesser known to the spotlight: Bill Gross, founder of GoTo.com, the first company to successfully provide an Internet search engine which relied upon sponsored search results and pay-per-click advertisements. It is these parts of the book that are most interesting, and enlightening. Not to mention, the book is a lot more credible with so many key figures of the Search industry being incorporated into the book.

Before reading this I thought that Search was just a box to enter in terms to search for. However, it is a rapidly growing field that morphs with many business ramifications: advertising, media, and sales to name a few. As we all know, Google makes the majority of their money off advertisements. In addition, many Internet users use the search engine to do their shopping as they are able to do some research on the item and find the best price before making their final purchase. Or, many also just do it because it allows for them to conveniently shop in the comforts of their own homes. The search engine's capabilities are endless. Many really novel ideas are and will continue to be coming out of the search engine/internet media industry. Already, we are thinking beyond text search queries and looking into visual queries. However, at the same time, agreeing with Battelle, we are definitely not far from search becoming like the voice of the Star Trek computer that even understands our verbal queries.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

"Search" begins quest for more answers., 2008-11-17
Well written, with insight gained from years of interviews, Search was an easy, entertaining read. Not only did it breakdown some of the timeline about Google's success, it gave insight into the inner workings of the Google and it's founders, as well as a view into the entire field of search. The book inspired a quest for a deeper knowledge of the web itself.


0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

Outdated , 2008-11-11
Already outdated...
Also, this book is not very well written and is slow to read.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

A good overview of Internet Search and the companies involved, 2008-10-05
John Battelle subtitles his book, The Search, "How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture." This statement is quite ambitious and the book does not quite live up to it. It does, however, give a good overview of the role of Search, its effect on business and life, and how various companies, especially Google, were involved. The topic is of great importance to all of us, whether or not we avidly search the Internet. Thus it is an important book and for that reason I give it a high evaluation. The strong point of the book is that Battelle is both knowledgeable and well connected on this subject, thus he is able to get access to the key players involved with Search--Brin and Page at Google, Bezos at Amazon, Yang and Filo at Yahoo, etc. Battelle also tells some interesting stories about lesser known figures such as Bill Gross. It is these parts of the book that are most interesting and enlightening.

But the book also suffers from a number of flaws, some repairable, some not.
First of all, as Battelle notes, that doing a book on Search can be boring and the sections of the volume that are strictly about this topic are indeed not very interesting, especially for those of us who are not technically versed on computer and Internet language. One shortcoming of the book is that it could have benefited from a glossary. Battelle assumes that he readers are literate enough to understand what he means by such terms as "petabyte" and "exabyte" and uses language that is beyond the understanding of ordinary people. For example, on page 171 he quotes extensively from comments made by Tim Armstrong, VP of advertising at Google, regarding the future state of advertising that are large unintelligible to a non-technical person. His use of words such as "scale" also assumes that the reader understands the meaning of this word in technological jargon. Finally, there is the following example from page 268: "The gate opens and you drive one-quarter mile to a four-story slate gray building, which looks rather like a Nakamichi preamp, only with windows..." Well, of course, now I know what the building looks like!!

A problem that is not correctable is that the book is dated. Battelle completed it in early 2003 which makes it ancient history in the fast paced world of the Internet. Thus it is more of a history of Search rather than a description of its present condition. He does give some of his insights in the future potential of search and this parts are interesting and thought-provoking. Battlelle also spends too much time on Google. Admittedly this company is in the forefront of Internet Search, but it has been written about in detail. For example, The Google Story, by David Vise covers much of the same ground and, in my view, does a better job. Certainly it was necessary to cover the Alpha Dog in this field, but more about what others have done might have made the book more interesting.

In sum, The Search is well worth reading, but non-techies will have some trouble and techies may find it date



0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Great Read, 2008-09-28
I loved this book and how it approached talking about search instead of just Google. It covers other big players in the field, goes over the entire industry, in addition to giving solid and good information about Google itself.

Also loved the author's style and his ability to keep things relatively succinct.

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