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John Battelle

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture Hardcover – September 8, 2005

by John Battelle (Author)

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The story of the popular Internet search engine draws on more than 350 interviews with executives at Google and other leading technology companies, explaining how it became one of the world's leading IPOs and revealing how Google and its competitors contributed to changes in information searching and viral marketing. 40,000 first printing.

Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Portfolio Hardcover
Publication date

September 8, 2005
Reading age

18 years and up
Dimensions

6.24 x 1.14 x 9.22 inches
ISBN-10

1591840880
ISBN-13

978-1591840886
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Editorial Reviews

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

Review

A must-read for anyone endeavoring to understand one of the most important trends of this generation. -- Mary Meeker, managing director and Internet analyst, Morgan Stanley

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

Battelle's figured out why search is so damned important... and managed to turn the subject into a compelling analog story. -- John Huey, editorial director, Time inc.

John Battelle has written a brilliant business book ... All searchers should read it. -- Walter Isaacson, CEO of the Aspen Institute; former editor of Time; CEO of CNN; author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made

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: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era

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

About the Author

John Battelle is a cofounding editor of Wired and the founder of The Industry Standard, as well as TheStandard.com. He is currently program chair for the Web 2.0 conference, a columnist for Business 2.0, and the founder, chairman, and publisher of Federated Media Publishing, Inc.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Portfolio Hardcover; First Edition (September 8, 2005)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1591840880
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1591840886
Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.24 x 1.14 x 9.22 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,980,636 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,144 in Computers & Technology Industry
- #1,446 in Social Aspects of Technology
- #2,340 in Web Marketing (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.3 162 ratings

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Phil Simon

Epic

Reviewed in the United States on May 18, 2012

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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 Beyond

While 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 more

Battelle 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.

7 people found this helpful

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H. Woo

Great book

Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2008

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The Search by John Battelle provides an interesting history of Internet search technology with a heavy emphasis on Google. It also highlights how search engines and the Internet have rapidly changed and offers insight into where search technology may be heading next. Although there is a heavy emphasis Google, the book ultimately aims at the bigger picture: the past, present, and future of search, in both the business and technology aspects.

John Battelle does a great job at giving a detailed overview of the role of Search, which is especially helpful for a person like me, who has a very limited knowledge of this topic. In addition, having a strong business and technical background, Battelle is even able to get a lot of insider information to further support his ideas. For example, he is able to incorporate his interviews with people like Brin and Page at Google, Bezos at Amazon, Yang and Filo at Yahoo, etc. Not to mention, he even brings the lesser known to the spotlight: Bill Gross, founder of GoTo.com, the first company to successfully provide an Internet search engine which relied upon sponsored search results and pay-per-click advertisements. It is these parts of the book that are most interesting, and enlightening. Not to mention, the book is a lot more credible with so many key figures of the Search industry being incorporated into the book.

Before reading this I thought that Search was just a box to enter in terms to search for. However, it is a rapidly growing field that morphs with many business ramifications: advertising, media, and sales to name a few. As we all know, Google makes the majority of their money off advertisements. In addition, many Internet users use the search engine to do their shopping as they are able to do some research on the item and find the best price before making their final purchase. Or, many also just do it because it allows for them to conveniently shop in the comforts of their own homes. The search engine's capabilities are endless. Many really novel ideas are and will continue to be coming out of the search engine/internet media industry. Already, we are thinking beyond text search queries and looking into visual queries. However, at the same time, agreeing with Battelle, we are definitely not far from search becoming like the voice of the Star Trek computer that even understands our verbal queries.

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Serghiou Const

The power of Search: a boundless potential

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 9, 2006

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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!

3 people found this helpful

Jeremy Walton

The Searchers

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 19, 2017

Verified Purchase

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.

2 people found this helpful

Mans Art

Heute schon gegoogelt?

Reviewed in Germany on August 19, 2012

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Kaum ein Unternehmen zuvor hat die Welt so rasant verändert wie Google. Doch was steckt dahinter, was trieb die Gründer Larry Page und Sergey Brin an? Wie kam es zu diesem gewaltigen Umbruch der sich auch im Denken der Menschen manifestiert hat? Heute sind ganze Wirtschaftszweige auf der Suche nach neuen Geschäftsfeldern und sie nutzen die Infrastruktur und Technologie von Google. John Battelle beleuchtet die Anfänge als auch die Gegenwart, er nimmt zukünftige Entwicklungen vorweg und beäugt ebenso kritisch Google's Credo - Don't be evil

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Derry

Mehr erwartet, maßlos enttäuscht

Reviewed in Germany on October 5, 2020

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Sowohl der Schreibstil als auch der Aufbau des Buches haben mich persönlich nicht überzeugt. Es wurden komplexe Sachverhalte abstrakt ohne liebe und für den Leser nachvollziehbar aufbereitet.

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Aaron Jackson

Really interesting

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 15, 2013

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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.

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