Geek Book Review - The Search by John Battelle

The full name of this book is actually “The Search - How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture”. The author of this book John Battelle was the co-founding editor of Wired Magazine and is now the founder and chairman of Federated Media, a company that manages advertising for some of the most visited blogs such as Boing Boing, GigaOm and Techcrunch.

As you can see from the title, this book is not entirely about Google but also talks about the other search companies, some that have already ceased to exist, and also the search industry in general. However, Google being the indisputable leader in search, it is inevitable that they are mentioned most within the book. The book starts by addressing the dynamics of the search process, i.e. the who, what, when, whys. It also talks about the fundamental technologies behind search in layman terms.

The book then goes into the early players of search such as Lycos, Alta Vista and Yahoo. The story of how Google was formed within the labs of Stanford University was then discussed with focus on the famous PageRank algorithm. A chapter was then dedicated to the pay per click model and how goto.com came up with the idea with Google adopting a similar model in the form of Adwords.

The rest of the book is entirely about Google and how it tries to stick with their “not to be evil” mantra even though going public, the federal government and countries such as China forces them to deviate from their original believes. The book then ends with what the author perceives the future of search will be like.

This book doesn’t introduce any profound theories about technology, but gives a very in depth analysis of search and the economy that surrounds it. It will be a interesting read for people interested in the technical aspect of web technology and less so for the business centric reader unless they have a vested interest in search.

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