John Battelle's The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, asks this question on page 13: "What, in the end, might search tell use about ourselves and the global culture we are creating together online?" That to me is a profoundly interesting question, but Battelle's book doesn't explore it nearly enough. He raises all the right questions in the first chapter of his book, but then he takes readers off into a story about the decisions and players who shaped the Google industry we know to today. I would guess from a business sense that story is integral to the meaning of search in the digital age, but for me the best parts of the book are when Battelle focuses on addressing that question that many of us have not thought a lot about. Yet, the search for stuff is multi-billion dollar industry. The process of search has become a commodity, and it can be used and manipulated in very powerful ways. Sadly most of us can‘t even image how the culture and politics of search can and will impact future generations.

Battelle traces some of the issues of privacy and control about what it means to amass, catalog and make available every bit of data that makes it othe Internet. In other words, there will come a time when every piece of knowledge, especially all knowledge that matters will reside in data bases throughout the world, and Google and other search companies will play a huge role in shaping the future of search and database control. They already are doing so.

It would have been very interesting to read what media critic Marshall McLuhan (1911-1990) would have said about search in modern culture. He of course was onto the subject before the founders of Google were even born. He coined the concept of the global village, which refers to “how the globe has been contracted into a village by electric technology and the instantaneous movement of information from every quarter to every point at the same time. In bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion, electric speed has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree.“

Battelle doesn’t reference McLuhan or even invite his readers to know who is. But I think if Battelle could have explored that question he raises a lot better if he used McLuhan as his guide.

The Search okay book, but it just scratches the surface in exploring the issue of search in a global culture.

Pretty technical at times but a truly fascinating story not only about how google was born but how search engines have changed our lives and our anthropological makeup. Kind of want to go work for google now.

I have no idea why it took me so long to read this book, but I'm glad I stuck it out. Although I was hoping there would be more insight into how search engines have changed our lives, it was still enjoyable reading about how Google and some of the other search engines were created and developed into the media/technological giants they are today.

Fascinating book, great explanation of the importance and mechanism of searches and really highlights Google's development as a company. Also a fast read with entertaining and accessible explanation of the search industry.

Started reading it since about a month ago. It was when my boss asked me to develop search feature in one of our projects. The book has nothing to do with that but I like the idea that both my hobby and my job shared the same theme :P. Unfortunately, I have this problem of always putting aside non fiction books after one or two chapters at most. Ho ho, too many books!! Can't resist those YA books T_T.

With this they even say Bill gates must have this book. In The Search it tells how google went from a lonely search engine into one that now rules the world. This book goes through google and how they went against the silcon norms and did there own thing. The search tells how google will transform the future and how there should be no fear.

Sergey and Larry, met in Stanford in 1995. Sergey, a second year computer science PhD Candidate was giving a campus tour to prospective students who wanted to join Stanford. Larry Page, who was inclined towards mathematics, was an outgoing extrovert, something Sergey didn't like much. But both of them would end up solving an important problem of indexing websites. It was trivial to find new pages one after another, but there was no way to find out what pages were linked back to a webpage. Enter "backrub" the pre-google name. Brin helped make an algorithm which would rank each page based on the number of people who visited them, roughly how peer reviewed articles work. An article is important if it has many citations, hence a page must be important if many people visit it. While this was a computer science and mathematics problem, it will eventually have implications on the daily livelihoods of people.

While technology is one part, business model seems to have given google an upper hand, even though they were years behind other players like Yahoo, AltaVista, A9 etc. The book does a great job at explaining the phenomenon of a simple math algorithm changing people's lives. This story is of a company evolving from a lab onto a garage and moving on to a building seems very organic and human from a 2005 perspective. Of course today it is a behemoth and an unimaginable integral part of our modern lives which the author tries to predict.

Also, Google seems to be a geek fest. From deriving it's name from "googol" to offering 14.159 million shares ( from the value of pi) in it's IPO, the geeks were always in control. Hence, this book sends a message to all the geeks (including me, i was told), that we can change the world!.

Great vision of what 'Search' means to us as human beings and tho the humanity as a whole. Although the book has to talk about Google, because it is the most known search engine out there, it is not a book about Google, but a book about how our own actions and decisions can limit our outcomes. A must-read for anyone who wants to know where to look if they want answers about the world they live in.

It's rare for me to find a non-fiction book I can find as engaging as a novel, but The Search managed to grip me from beginning to end. If you want to understand the technology that allows Google to make bazillions and where it'll be going in the future, read this book.

Firstly, the book is much more than about Google as a company. As the title, suggests it is about the Search, a nact to find information and an intent to do something. Of the several concepts the book introduces the most interesting one is the Database of Intentions, with all our searches, we are building a Database of Intentions. This helps us to understand the power of internet and the cultural impact it has.

As the book was first published in 2005, reading it in 2020, might not help the current generation to relate to a lot of things, but clearly helps to understand the foundations of how we reached where we are today. You will of course get know about Google, from the very beginning - in that matter the book is well balanced, as it appreciates the hings Google did well, its strengths, but also clearly points out the things Google did wrong, its weakness, and the how its competitors are panning out in those areas.

The "Perfect Search" chapter is particularly interesting to help the reader realise the potential of search, and where it might be at decently advanced stage. We are pretty much seeing some of those innovations now, but some are yet to come. It is a good read overall, but not a very easy one though. All searchers should read it.

The Search is an amazing book! It has somehow managed to tell the story of Google's overnight success and its continuing potential in a novel like manner that is easy to follow. It tells an incredible story about the past, present, and future of search technology, and the enormous impact it is starting to have on marketing, dating, media, pop culture, shopping, job hunting, people finding, civil liberties, and just about every other element of human interest.

This book is a must read for anyone interested in business, computer science and communication, search, the internet in general, or the cultural implications Google has had on our culture.

John Battelle expends a vast amount of his energy and my time describing the history of the web and search in general before finally getting to the real point of the book "how Google and its rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture." For roughly the first 180 pages, I was tempted to cast this book aside, but when I crossed that boundary, I found his analysis of the potential for search as a knowledge and economic commodity both engaging and exciting.

The book suffers somewhat from "the Wired syndrome" -- and rightfully so, since Battelle was a founding editor of the magazine -- a syndrome in which the writer tries to appear both smarter and snarkier than thou, while ultimately revealing only a layperson's understanding of the material. This can be trying (I have canceled my Wired subscription twice and fully expect to cancel it again in the future). In this case, Battelle describes a wonderful vision for what search could be, based on what sound like fascinating conversations with real experts in the field. His glosses of terms like the "semantic web" and "intention-based advertising" are clear, succinct and wonderfully usable. His tendency to convert _everything_ to laymen's tems is, however, annoying as hell.