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

A few weeks ago, I saw a list of the best business books of all time. I was a bit proud of myself that I had read most of them--at had at least heard of the rest. For whatever reason, though, one book had escape me over the years: The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. I was more than five years late, but figured that I owed it to myself to give it a read.I'm glad that I did.I had seen Battelle on Bloomberg West and he was particularly smart and articulate. My one initial hesitation with The Search: I had already read many books about Google. (I count Ken Auletta's book among my very favorites.) Did I really need to read yet another book about Larry and Sergey's company?But here's the rub: Battelle's book is hardly Google-specific. Rather, it's about the vast implications of being able to find an increasing amount of information within seconds, a trend that shows no signs of abating. Now, to be sure, you can't write a book about the history of search without delving into Google, but this is a book about so much more than one company. For instance, I learned a great deal about the role of Bill Gross and GoTo.com, a precursor to Google and the guy who cracked the nut on paid placements. I hadn't realized that Larry and Sergey modified Gross' central idea.A Glimpse of What's BeyondWhile I probably should have read this excellent text when it was released, in a way I'm happy that I stumbled upon it now. Sure, AOL and Yahoo! are not nearly as relevant today as they were when Battelle was hammering away on his Mac. But reading books like this years after their release allows you to assess the author's predictions ex post facto. Battelle's vision of then then-future in 2006 is, for the most part, panning out.On a general level, my very favorite business books do the following:* advance a big idea* teach me something new (not that easy to do, since I read many non-fiction, business, and technology books)* tell interesting stories* leave me wanting moreBattelle does all of the above with considerable aplomb. The man is a gifted writer and I can't wait for his next opus.Get. This. Book. Now.

This book delivers all it promises and more. "The Search" takes the reader on a walk down memory lane, back when numerous search engines served the Internet's search needs. During the '90s, search engines such as Alta Vista, Lycos, Excite, HotBot, AOL Search, MSN and, of course, Yahoo, served us all the searches we needed-but, alas, they did not work in the long run and are now virtually obsolete.I remember how those SEs were visciously spammed and manipulated by Search Engine "Optimizers" (SEOs.) The search results were seldom relevant and porn links prevailed. (I recall the time when my 7-year-old son searched for "Pokemon" and landed at a hardcore porn site.)There had to be a better way.Then, out of the blue, appeared a new search engine that changed all the rules and introduced "link popularity." Search was never the same again. Now search results are ALWAYS relevant. In fact, Google always returns exactly the sites I look for. Amazingly, it sometimes even suggests what it THINKS I'm looking for.This book tells this story and more, in detail. Although Google is featured prominently in the book, the author discusses in depth the search industry as a whole. You'll read about how ambitious and hungry Google, the company, is and about the power it possesses over Internet users.Very engrossing reading. Highly recommended.

Less than five years ago, two PhD. candidates, Sergey Brin and Larry Page launched their own search engine. Naming it Google, after the name of the largest known number, it has literally changed the face of internet searching as we know it. Gone are the days of multiple hits for basic search inquiries. With Google's page-ranking system, the searcher gets to see the most relevant searches listed first.This book does a remarkable job of telling Brin's and Page's story. From humble Silicon Valley students to the owners of the most prosperous company in the world, Brin and Page have changed the playing field for the entire internet. While many companies died out during the dot com days, Google survived and flourished. One of the oddities of Google's success is that they have achieved all of thier miraculous growth without a real working marketing plan. They have let the sheer influence and size of Google do the talking, and it has worked extremely well.Today, Google has become a household name. People constantly say "I've Googled this", or "I've Googled that". And they're right. With Google's method of search, it makes it very easy for the user to type almost anything into the search box and get back a near-perfect response. But we haven't made it to the "perfect search"; the idea of retrieving exact results for a specific search. With the way Google is going, it wouldn't be surprising if they solved this enigma.I read this book for a Master's degree course in library science, and I was fascinated by it. Brin and Page got to live everyone's ultimate dream; find something that will make you insanely rich. I use Google almost extensively in my own research, and I've been extremely pleased with the results. I was fascinated with the story of Google's unheard of rise from a small company being housed in a college dorm room to a giant that employs thousands of people. I highly recommend this book. Google is a one-of-a-kind company, and their story is truly remarkable. Read this great book and discover how the brainchild of two students turned into one of the world's most profitable companies.

I picked this up looking for a contemporary account of the rise of Google and the way in which search became so crucial in the navigation and organization of the web. It admirably succeeds in meeting these needs, reminding me of how Google sprinted past a host of competing search engines such as AltaVista and Yahoo thanks to the superiority of the algorithm it used to rank the relevance of its results. It also has a good account of how the company was established and its public offering in 2004; the same ground is covered by books like  The Google Story , although - as far as I can recall - this has better coverage of technical detail.Of course, the length of time which has elapsed between the book being written (in 2006) and me reading it (last week) can't be ignored - especially considering the rapid evolution of this technology and the way it's impacted our behaviour - but the author's emphases seem to have stood the test of time, and even his tentative predictions about future developments aren't so off-the-wall (though he seems to dismiss too quickly the importance of intellectual property in a joined-up world). Today's reader is reminded of how quickly reliable and authoritative search has become assimilated into our lives as Google becomes, in Sergey Brin's words, "the third half of your brain", and we give up keeping track of facts and figures, confident that they're just a click away. That's a transition which has been criticised elsewhere (see, for example,  The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember ), but this book is a handy reminder of a time when the future appeared less clear, and how we got to where we are. The Google StoryThe Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember

When a brilliant journalist writes about a contemporary and lava hot topic like Search-simply consider that Google which epitomizes Search experienced the phenomenal growth of 0 to $3 billion in the short time span of five years 2000-2004 -the result is a riveting book.There are similarities and parallels between the founders of Google and the founder of Microsoft. In both instances they are dropouts of elite universities in order to found companies and pursue their vision. In the case of Bill Gates the founder of Microsoft, the epiphany was the power of software. In the case of Larry Page and Sergey Brin the founders of Google, the driving insight was the power of Search.The object of Search is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.The author's treatment is balanced in that while he shows that the present Search is already enormous and its future virtually unlimited he also points to its ominous consequences such as the infringement on privacy.To show what the future for Search reserves, a comparison with Micrososft would suffice:The audacious goal of Bill Gates and Micropsoft was of a computer on every desk, and Microsoft products running on every computer. A goal achieved within twenty years and in the process rendering Bill Gates fabulously rich and Microsoft a stellar world company.Let us consider Google's audacious goal:to organize information and make it accessible. Forget about a computer on every desk. The entire world needs to become computerized. Anything of value will be in Google's index. We have to visualize the merging of the physical world with the World Wide Web.Microsoft's success was driving a computer to every desk with Windows on every computer. The next step in the evolution of the computer was the connection of every computer to every other-the Internet. But what comes after that?According to the cognoscenti, the web is in the process of becoming the next great computing platform-the successor to Microsoft Windows, owned by no one but used by everyone. The web is also in the process of connecting to everything, just name it. The companies best positioned to deliver hugely scaled services over the web platform are best positioned to win. And when it comes to hugely scaled services nothing beats Search.Google's mission of organizing information and making it accessible sets the company up to deliver nothing short of every possible service that might live on top of a computing platform:the Google grid.We can conceive in our digital future Google as phone company; as cable provider; as university; as eBay, Amazon, Microsoft, Expedia, and Yahoo all folded in one. Fascinating, beguiling and awe inspiring!

Awesome! Great book

This book is a really interesting book into the history of how Google came to become the biggest search engine on the planet. It covers the how competitive the search market actually is.Very interesting, definitely worth a read if you interested in this kind of book.

As an IT professional, I thought this would be a good read. Maybe it's just me but it's a bit boring.