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

For reasons I cannot explain, I decided to read the book I purchased last (at the bottom of the stack) and write a review on it last night - and it was this book. Maybe it was the 'Googlish' letters that beckoned to me, maybe it was an innate need to understand better how Google works. I've written and thought about search engines and Google a lot. 'A Monopoly of Words' and 'The Oracles revisited: The Google Problem' leaned heavily toward the abilities of Google, and the potential in the future - but not as in depth and researched as I would have liked. That sort of requires a budget.

Going into the book, I was positive probably just because, unlike so many things related to Google, I could hold this book. If that sounds strange, then consider this - how many times have you used Google, and how many times have you actually physically touched something that had to do with Google? Maybe your mouse and keyboard are working for Google behind your back (and in a sense, they are). That search engines have changed the internet is no secret - how they have done so has evaded the attention of most people. This book is for the people who haven't really noticed; a trumpet after the charge.

It was an interesting read, full of real-world examples of how Google can 'giveth or taketh away'. In the first chapter, John Battelle discusses how the 'Database of our intentions' is in Google - that people type their questions, their queries, their searches into the 'Wizard of Oz' sort of screen, and keeps track of all of these queries. These queries say a lot about society. It's a marketer's dream - being able to know what people want, what people will want, and what people have wanted. It's magical to a lot of people - go to the quiet, unusually plain Google page and type in a few words, get a list of things related, and move on. While it's not perfect yet, it's getting better (and we're learning how to use it better).

Battelle spends a lot of time in the book writing about the ins and outs of the company behind the vanilla query page, which I did find interesting but some may not. How those ins and outs tie into what Google does and has done and how it has affected society is what is most interesting, and is what I would hazard most readers would be interested in. Battelle does not disappoint in this regard - from a shoe store in Florida losing business during the holiday season to 'Search Engine Optimization Experts' changing the way businesspeople viewed the internet - and being brought down with a simple algorithm change.

I remember these periods on the internet. I was experimenting myself, but the focus was to add value. My theory is that if a site adds value to the internet, the site will do well in search engine results. Therefore, the parts of the book which deal with 'black hat' and 'white hat' search engine optimization were very attractive because of the moral ambiguities related to them.

How many times have you gotten search results from a search engine, chose the top one, only to have to go back because the top site was only a place for advertisers? I can't count that high. And we hold search engines accountable when we get bad results - which means that they have to go back to refining how they get those results, which means that businesses drop off the side of the planet when they get in the crossfire.

If you're going to walk down the street and there's crossfire, you should know the lay of the street yourself. Trusting a guide completely is foolish.

Google's growth astonished a lot of people, and the "Don't Be Evil" concept has put it in some morally precarious positions - such as internet censorship in China. While it's easy to sit in the cheap seats and toss insults at a company when it does bad things, it's much more difficult to be the group of people that makes such decisions. The information that flows through the internet is a rollercoaster, even to the Captains of the Ships called search engines - perhaps, especially because of them. There's an information tempest behind your web browser, and search engines simply make sense of it for you.

The potential of search engine technology is lost on many people, and this book can bring them to grips with the reality of search engines - not just Google, but all search engines. It takes us through the pathways of data, of knowledge, and how these pathways connect us in ways that we are still coming to grips with. Even the 'experts' out there who analyze search engines don't know all the implications; they are experts only because they know how to do certain things with search engines. Finite things, and the future is not finite.

Understanding how all of this works is imperative for all on the internet - from the business owners to the individuals who just tap into the internet as a vast resource. This book is a step in the right direction.