Product 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.

"Battelle has written a brilliant business book, but he's also done something more... All searchers should read it."
-Walter Isaacson, CEO of the Aspen Institute

"This book ought to be called 'The Answer.' As usual, John Battelle delivers insightful, thought-provoking, and essential reading."
-Seth Godin, author of All Marketers Are Liars and Purple Cow

"Nobody, and I mean nobody, has thought longer, harder, or smarter about Google and the search business than John Battelle."
-John Heilemann, author of Pride Before the Fall

"A must read for anyone endeavoring to understand one of the most important trends of this generation.'"
-Mary Meeker, Managing Director, Internet Analyst, Morgan Stanley

"Battelle has... figured out why "search" is so damned important to the future of everything digital. Even more impressive, he's actually managed to turn the subject into a compelling analog story.
-John Huey, editorial director, Time inc.

"A terrific book."
--L. Gordon Crovitz, Dow Jones

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #486157 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-03
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

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

From Publishers Weekly
Rather than write a book strictly about the rise of Google as a business, technology journalist Battelle targets his research on the concept of Internet search, beginning the book with a discussion of an abstract idea he terms the "Database of Intentions," defined as the sum total of all queries that pour into search engines daily, revealing the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of our culture. Though most of the book is devoted to the search engine giant (which Battelle reports corners 51 percent of the search engine market), the author also includes chapters on "Search, Before Google" and the "Who, What, Where, Why, When. And How (much)" of search. Battelle is at his best when describing the creation of Google, especially through the yin-yang personalities of its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and in describing the company's culture. Though Battelle's descriptions of Internet search technology can get too technical for readers without a computer science background, the book is a deeply researched and nimbly reported look at how search has defined the Internet and how it will continue to be a tremendous reflection of culture.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Battelle, entrepreneur, writer, and academic, explores the concept of search, one of the Internet's first useful services, which adopted an actual business model in banner advertising. This also is a book about the fabulous success of Google, which is at the core of Battelle's research, but the book is broader in scope than one company's story. We learn that the impact of search on our culture is extraordinary--it could bring together the convergence of television and personal computers and it could lead to the creation of artificial intelligence. The author opens up our perspective on the enormity of search and society's collective click stream, the product of our online lives as played out across Internet sites and private machines with e-mails recorded and preserved, and although losing some privacy, we seek convenience, service, and power. Battelle sees the search engines of the future as intelligent agents and reference librarians holding all of human knowledge. This is an excellent, thought-provoking book. Mary Whaley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

A good overview of Internet Search and the companies involved
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

Great Read
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.

great book at a great price
I love the tech industry and this book didn't disappoint. It is very well written and it keeps you interested the entire way through. It also does a very good job of following the Google story from beginning up to almost-current-day. I couldn't beat the price that I got this for on Amazon.