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The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules
John Battelle
John Battelle has written a brilliant business book ... All searchers should read it. - Walter Isaacson
of Business and Transformed Our Culture
Portfolio Hardcover
September 2005
320 pages ISBN: 1591840880 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
What does the world want? According to John Battelle, a
company that answers that question -- in all its shades of
meaning -- can unlock the most intractable riddles of both
business and culture. And for the past few years, that's
exactly what Google has been doing.
Jumping into the game long after Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite,
Lycos, and other pioneers, Google offered a radical new
approach to search, redefined the idea of viral marketing,
survived the dotcom crash, and pulled off the largest and
most talked about initial public offering in the history of
Silicon Valley. But The Search offers much more than the inside story of
Google's triumph. It's also a big-picture book about the
past, present, and future of search technology, and the
enormous impact it is starting to have on marketing, media,
pop culture, dating, job hunting, international law, civil
liberties, and just about every other sphere of human
interest. More than any of its rivals, Google has become the gateway
to instant knowledge. Hundreds of millions of people use it
to satisfy their wants, needs, fears, and obsessions,
creating an enormous artifact that Battelle calls "the
Database of Intentions." Somewhere in Google's archives,
for instance, you can find the agonized research of a gay
man with AIDS, the silent plotting of a would-be bombmaker,
and the anxiety of a woman checking out her blind date.
Combined with the databases of thousands of other search-
driven businesses, large and small, it all adds up to a
goldmine of information that powerful organizations
(including the government) will want to get their hands on. No one is better qualified to explain this entire
phenomenon than Battelle, who cofounded Wired and founded
The Industry Standard. Perhaps more than any other
journalist, he has devoted his career to finding the holy
grail of technology -- something as transformational as the
Macintosh was in the mid- 1980s. And he has finally found
it in search. Battelle draws on more than 350 interviews with major
players from Silicon Valley to Seattle to Wall Street,
including Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and
CEO Eric Schmidt, as well as competitors like Louis Monier,
who invented AltaVista, and Neil Moncrief, a soft-spoken
Georgian whose business Google built, destroyed, and built
again. Battelle lucidly reveals how search technology actually
works, explores the amazing power of targeted advertising,
and reports on the frenzy of the Google IPO, when the
company tried to rewrite the rules of Wall Street and
declared "don't be evil" as its corporate motto. For anyone who wants to understand how Google really
succeeded -- and the implications of a world in which every
click can be preserved forever -- THE SEARCH is an eye-
opening and indispensable read.
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