Witty and sophisticated in its style, this book is a treasure that recorded the evolving changes of the “search” business through early internet age. Going so far to the technology fundamentals yet also showcases the boom and bust of the late 1990 tech bubbles. A must-read if you want to understand the tech business, or to understand how the tech field has become what it is like today.

Highly recommended.

Amazing business story that I read during my MBA studies. This is a must read for all business candidates and helps us understand the concept of market busting ideas. Really enjoyed the background information about Google.

This chronicles the rise of the infamous Google corporation and discourses on the impact it has had on the structure of our lives and our web browsing experience. Whilst I did find it of interest, the information is now a little dated and technology has moved on from the time of publication. The later portion of the book focuses on projected estimations for Google's future, which is of little relevance to a modern-day reader.

This book is not just about Google, but about the search economy at large. Nevertheless, Google features in each and every chapter and most of the discussion revolves around the rise of company so far and its future prospects. Battelle begins with a background of search before Google. Next, he describes the lives of Google founders: Larry Page & Sergey Brin and their days at Stanford and the first days of the company. This is followed by rise of Google rise and its historic IPO. The book concludes with a discussion about the search in future, and the impact it would have on our day-to-day lives.

The book is certainly worth a read because unlike other books, it dares to ask some uncomfortable questions about the most-loved company of our age. It is ironical that Google hoards information about the world is very reticent when it comes to sharing details about itself. Also, the way Google compromised its search results to exclude the links that offended Chinese govt has not gone down well with many of industry experts.

Let's get the obvious out of the way first - my copy of this book was published in 2005. Now, that might not seem like a huge revelation, but eight years is a long time in the age of the internet - in fact, Facebook didn't even exist when the book was written, at least in not in any recognisable form.

This book is so old that even Yahoo, the lumbering behemoth that eventually collapsed under its own weight, is listed as a major Google competitor, claiming 24% of the search market compared to Google's 51%.

Now that we've got that out of the way, though, we can focus on the positives - Battelle's book is a thoroughly engaging journey through the history of search engine development, covering everything from AOL to Alta Vista through Excite, Lycos and Ask Jeeves. Remember those guys?

In all honesty and despite its age, The Search is a gripping read that delivers on its promise to explain "how Google and its rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture." It's fascinating to learn the intricacies of search, from algorithms to the major innovation that was GoTo's Overture and Google's AdWords, two similar systems which finally monetised search with relevant, contextual advertising.

But perhaps most interesting is the final chapter, with Battelle's prophecies for the future of search and what he calls the 'perfect search', when search engines can actually understand their users' queries and answer them intelligently, like a librarian that's managed to memorise the contents of each of the books in his collection.

We're not quite there yet, but we've moved on in leaps and bounds since Battelle's book was published in 2005, and a lot of those predictions have already come to fruition. The rest are on their way...

great book for all those interesting in the past, present, and future of search technologies. also interesting for anyone interested in the rise and fall of many prominent tech companies over the past 15-20 years.
well written and super informative!

Read this book for a class on Search Engines...actually, it was pretty interesting and engaging. The author wrote it in a very natural kind of ....technology magazine writer-style.
Easy and fun read if you're interested in computer-stuff.

This chronicle shows us how the infamous search engine, Google started from scratch. Google started its journey at no. 6 of 6 search engines in the world and then slowly turned out to be no. 1 in the world.

1. As we all know Xerox Corporation was the first inventor of personal computers but failed miserably to remain competitive in the market. Alta Vista was the first search engine in the market, just like Xerox, the first PC producers. Alta vista failed to go public for three conservative years under three different owners. The book summarises how 2 PHD students at Sanford university, Folio and Yang got bored and started a company. Yahoo stands for Yet Another winner.

2. Google’s first beta project was Google News. Eric Schmidt was the founding CEO and Chairman at Google, saw a very good opportunity and dived into it without any second thoughts. At first, Google found out WYSIWYG software and tested it on a Macintosh on the same year, 1984. Netscape made its journey in the stock exchange in 1995. Etched became the silicon hub of the next 150,000 google servers. Later that year Google started researching on their AI.

3. The basic 5 questions about any topic before writing about it are: Who? What? When? Why? Where? Nevertheless, there is a 6th question sometimes, How? A search engine consists of 3 things, crawl, index, runtime system. Crawler shows us how we get the results. The URL is the crawler, which is the least visible. The search engine page is the index and finally the page which is ready for the users to view is the runtime index. One word query is also available. Google mainly focuses on the key words for their searches. TREC was introduced which reduced the storage from 147 GB to a mere 20 GB. This skyrocketed Google’s share price.

4. Before Google, Achie was used which used an File Transfer Protocol (FTP). In 1993, World Wide Web (WWW) was born. In the late 1990s Alta Vista search engine was born. The footsteps of Alta Vista was later followed by Google. In 1995, was the start of the peak for search, as dozens of new companies were formed at that time. Alta Vista failed and Google still ment 1 following by 100 zeros. Alta Vista tried to bite off more than it could chew and failed miserably at the end. Google was also funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers.

5. Larry Page and Sirgie started the World Wide Web (WWW) at first. Page set the price for Google for a whopping $1.6 million, Just after a few days of going public. At that time Page was the CEO of the company and Brian was the President. In 1998, Google brought Netscape.

6. Google was doing so bad that that founders of the company was about to sell the whole company in only a fraction of its original value. After spending an afternoon in an idea factory with Bill Gates he decided to keep the company for himself, which paid off in the long run. Overtune, acquires Yahoo for $1.63 billion. Google terrified the mistakes, which led Alta Vista to be hacked and finally saved themselves.

7. The initial cash outflow of Google was more than USD 500 million each month and the bank balance was less than USD 20 million. Google became the largest search engine in the world with 60 million searches each day, by the end of the year 2000. All Google adds were ordered to be text only. In October 2000, Google’s new paid service AdWord was introduced in the market.

8. Monicrief, is a small business and is situated on the brink of loss. Though it has survived the nuclear winter of 2001-2002. Google drove a lot of customers to Monicrief and later on, in the summer it got a new boss named Google. The company was rebrand as Google. The SEO off Google started to flourish in the eastern markets and was making instant cash. Google suddenly lost one Christmas sale season and lost millions in revenue. Google’s marketing messages were published everywhere on online.

9. Google has everyone’s address and google will not tell anyone else apart from the owner. In 2004, Gmail was launched and their message limit was 1GB which was far greater than their competitors 10 MB. People reacted negatively towards this address collection service. They started saying that Google was spying on them. Google later that year introduced privacy search. In mid 2002, Google launched there local Mandarin and Chinese languages in China to grab the world’s fastest growing market.

10. Success and failure are equally disastrous. In 2004, Google started growing and it was the major turning point for the company. $18 million all of a sudden turned into $ 300 thousand, as the price fell from $200 to $85. The income of Google rose from $100 million in 2003 to $1 billion by 2004.

11. Schmidt, Page and Brian increased the number of employees from 3000 people to 30000 people. The competition from Yahoo and Microsoft kept on increasing. Lunch in Google was free which was not the case for its competitors.

12. The near future of Google was not very bright, as new inventions were being rolled out once every week. This led the competition to be very high. In later years the search engine was slowly turned into Artificial Intelligence (AI). After the launch of Napster, the company focused on music. This helped Google to capture the music industry as the market was already established by Napster. Google helped a poor child find his father, who was kept a secret from the child for nearly fifteen years.

A perfect search requires every single possible information on your fingertips. Which is really fun. This book contains all the information about the steps Google has crossed to get to the position it is in today. The book is really interesting. You should read the book at least one of you are a tech freak.

The word “Search” in a large font size has caught my attention. In the cover page of the book it is written, “John Battelle has written a brilliant business book. To do this he has used the amazing sage of Google to explore what is meant to search. Every searchers should read it.” Now I really understand why after reading the full book.

Finally we see,
1. Archie was the first search engine, followed by Gopher which helped to modernise search engines.

2. GNP standing for Gross National Product was created by Bill Gross which was used to convert natural language to machine language. Google’s main approach was to encourage people to start a business and then get acquired by Google.

3. Google’s Google answer service was launched by Bill Gross in 1998.

4. Babylonia was an ancient name of Iraq.

A well-done and recommended history of Google and its business model. I suppose some might be put off by the more wide-eyedly journalistic parts about the "Database of Intentions" and so forth, but in this case I actually liked them.

An excellent look at the backbone of the internet's role in our lives and the guys who brought it to us. You wouldn't think that the history of search engines would be so interesting, but it's a n eye-opening story.

i read this book about a few weeks ago. i get it from my university library. so i interested to this book. i get good information from it that how serch engine have important for our life when we need answer from our question. and google is good tool for that. inntead this book talk about the business side. but i aspirate to this book and thanks.

I read it in Thai copy : the problem of the book is the translator, I don't know ; how editor of this Thai copy let this kind of confusing work to sell for Thai reader: I can not finished this one in the last, it's too boring in the way of translation : So Bye.