Product Description

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

• The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek Bestseller
• Finalist for the Goldman Sachs/FT Business Book of the Year Award

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 business and arguably of human culture itself. And for the past few years, that’s exactly what Google has been doing.

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31900 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

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

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

An insight into a company and an industry
As a computer professional I thought I pretty much got Search chalked out. It was quite a revelation to see that this book reveals facets about search that I did not comprehend before.

Very exciting book and incidentally very good information about Google as a company as well.
You can see my blog entry below as well if interested in my review: http://rajascyberspot.blogspot.com/2008/08/google-and-story-of-search.html

Great overview of the Search industry
It's a great overiview of the search industry and its brief but intense history.

However, it's also a good and refreshing reminder that success stories, such as Google's, are not envisioned or planned they way they later unfold. For example, the book explains how Google early on tried to sell their search engine to Yahoo! or one of the other portals, but no buyer was found! Google was in financial hardships and did not know how to make money (except with traditional banner ads) when Bill Gross came up with the pay-per-click model that Google simply copied.

Great, detailed, account on the foundation of how search became what it is
This book provides a great review and account of the history on how the foundation of 'search' became what it is.

From original information retrieval technology, to modern day search the reader is taken on a journey from dorm-room technology to startup company with all the situations and decisions that search pioneers faced, in the early days of search to what is now the status quo.

As someone who has grown up with search, this is a great read of how search evolved and provides a great backbone for understanding the relationships of the various companies involved. This is a must read for those in the SEO/SEM industry.