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Finalist in the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year, now in an updated paperback with a new afterword. The rise of Google is one of the most amazing stories of our time. Jumping into the search industry long after Yahoo!, AltaVista, Lycos, and other competitors, Google offered a radical new approach to search, redefined the idea of viral marketing, and in just seven years became the largest IPO in the history of Silicon Valley. Google’s enormous impact straddles the worlds of technology, marketing, finance, media, culture, dating, job hunting, and just about every other sphere of human interest. And no one is better qualified to explain this entire phenomenon than John Battelle, the acclaimed Silicon Valley journalist who cofounded Wired and founded The Industry Standard. In this fascinating narrative of the past, present, and future of search, Battelle draws on more than 350 interviews with executives at Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and other companies, including Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt. Battelle explores how search technology works, the amazing power of targeted advertising as a business model, and the frenzy of the Google IPO when the company tried to rewrite the rules of Wall Street and declared "don’t be evil" as one of its core goals. Battelle is equally enlightening about the cultural impact of the search industry. Every day, billions of searches reveal the wants, needs, fears, and obsessions of humankind – an unprecedented record that Battelle calls the database of intentions. What will Google and other companies do with all that information? Will the government regulate the search business? And what happens to privacy when every word ever written about someone is permanently archived and searchable in a fraction of a second? "A brilliant business book. All searchers should read it." —Walter Isaacson, CEO of the Aspen Institute, former editor of Time

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #724798 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