atpit, i'm really new to this kind of reading. this only being my second book of this kind.
i was surprised, how easy "John Batelle" made this book for the reader, or in my case listener, to understand.
upfront i was a little afraid that a history of algorithms & semantic could be a little tedious - but it wasn't! not at all.
this is a good insight into the business side of search, showing how google,coming in late, fared to other big guns. it really is amazing how apparently small differences can have a huge effect on how a company develops.
it was also important & very interesting getting to know other players in the search game, that the world as seemingly forgotten.
John Batelle sheds all contemporaries a fair amount of lime light, lining out their brilliance and shortcomings. Has you might expect, even Google is not perfect!
a great book if your a upcoming entrepreneur, tech-geek or just out to understand the background of a company that is so omnipresent in todays most important medium - the internet.

Search is really focused on Google but if HotBot, the original Excite or just the use of the Internet in general rings true for you over the past 10 years, pick up this book.

It's a quick read and you realize how much of an impact the guys from Google are making in today's world.

Unlike other technology impacts, I can't see their contributions or impact being marginalized in the future as many others have in the past.

3.75 / 5.0

Nice historical sketch. Forecast of future trends is emblematic of how fast things have developed. current state of Search is orders of magnitude past what he envisioned. Well organized and easy to read and understand

(My review from HardKnockMBA.com)

So this was an interesting pick (it was on the top of the stack) for my first read in this endeavor, primarily because it isn’t necessarily a ‘business book’ in the traditional sense, so I had to approach it a bit differently, but it still proved rather insightful, and an enjoyable read for a techie like me.

The Search goes over the tale of how the search industry came about, starting with Archie and Gopher then Yahoo and GoTo and finally the arrival of Google. The point of particular mention here is that Google wasn’t the first, second, third, or even fiftieth search company, it came along relatively late in the game to fill a hole from a different angle, which subsequently is the niche it both created then dominated. Dominated to the extent that Battelle suggests that “Google is more than just another company. As far as the Internet ecosystem is concerned, Google is the weather.” (Pg 183)

So like I was saying, reading the non-business book left me without the luxury of bold, italicized, and highlighted points of emphasis for business lessons that the book is trying to teach. So it made for a good opportunity for me to pull out the pen and go after my own lessons that could be had in the story. I’ll go ahead with a quick sampling of what I found.

There is always a need for the entrepreneur

AltaVista, created by Monier while working for DEC (an large and now defunct computer company, if you don’t remember the good ole days) which had a good approach to search, grew to be widely accepted, but was never recognized for the opportunity it was by its behemoth of a parent company.

“Possibly most instructive [of the attempts at search:], AltaVista was the product of a company that was an extraordinary success in its original business but ultimately failed because of hidebound management unwilling to drive by anything other than the rearview mirror.” (pg 45)

(does this remind you of why you left middle management or started your own company? Maybe it’s just me) And eventually as DEC was going downhill, and AltaVista was gaining more and more traction, the opportunity was lost completely.

“Lang and Monier fought to protect Alta Vista from its flailing parent, but a mammal chained to a dinosaur more likely than not will get trampled.” (pg 50)

The lesson here for me is the existence of entrepreneurial opportunity. Often you can become discouraged or intimidated by big companies that supposedly dominate an industry, but the big companies aren’t designed to be able to fill every nook and cranny of an industry. There will always be opportunity for a little guy to come in and provide a more custom insightful solution to an existing problem, and often using a fraction of the resources. Big companies will mismanage the assets they have, or misalign the opportunity because they have shareholders to answer to and can rarely be visionary in the long term while keeping their sights focused on quarterly results.

Take for instance the recent recession drama we have experienced. Companies responded in one of two ways. Either they respond to their shareholders who demand they keep quarterly profits high and go into a wave of layoffs, crippling their alliances and internal advantages they’ve built up over the last decades, disregarding all thoughts of the company vision (how many mission statements were thrown out and replaced with “Stay in business” when the times got tough?) This is method A, which I saw most companies do, it’s the knee jerk reaction of survival mode, they were going to get through this recession, and that was as far as they could see.

The alternative to this (method B) is to use the recession as an opportunity. All of the sudden you can get great talent at a fraction of the cost, you can gain market share by sticking with advertising / marketing initiatives, etc. I saw a few companies do this, and the payoff to sticking to your guns is that they now have amazing talent in their groups, giving them a very specific advantage exiting the recession.

In the end the economy still moves, product still needs to be made, money still changes hands and it is the agile, strategic companies that come out with the advantage. These traits are found in the entrepreneur and small startups, because to double down in a recession is risky, and it’s the small guy that can take a risk that others aren’t willing to take.

The Tesla Lesson

Larry Page, at 12 years old, read the biography of Nikola Tesla (while I was reading Hardy Boys, he was reading about Tesla), an inventor who laid the foundation for technologies like wireless communication, X-ray , solar cells, and the modern power grid, but who still remains somewhat unknown “in particular when compared with Thomas Edison, a man Tesla worked for, fought with, and competed against for much of his career” (pg 66) Despite Tesla’s success, his inability to commercialize his success robbed him of fame, fortune, and seeing change happen in society because of his work. This is something that impacted Page throughout his career, and understandably so.

All the great ideas in the world don’t do anyone any good if you can’t get them into people’s hands. If you can’t distribute or capitalize on them, you have done a disservice to both yourself and the idea you are squandering. Don’t get caught up so much in the creating that you forget to make the creation mean something by scaling it and getting it out there. (also at fault here are perfectionists who think their product is never ready, cause “… well it’s just not there, a few more tweaks, just a few more days…”)

Summary

All in all it was a good read, though probably not one of my all time greatest business books at first glance. The story it conveys contains several business lessons just below the surface. The kind of lessons where, if you aren’t paying attention to them, you may miss them altogether.

4/5 stars, definitely worth checking out, if for nothing more than to understand the most significant (privacy and potential to alter our future) industry in the world.

Very well done. It's 15 years later and it's still amazing how Battelle lays the foundation and predicts today's future. A must-read, even today

This book was a better history of Google than the official "biography" I read on Google. It had more related stories, like sub-plots, that made for a richer experience. Most of the business related information was not new or incredibly interesting, but the search history was.

Fascinating book about the history and the future of the search engine. Although the book uses Google as a baseline, refering back to it quite often, it is not about Google. Facinating topics on business models, and how search is a precursor to AI and artifical consciousness possibly.

"The Search" is a great book that explains how the big guys are making money through search websites such as yahoo, google and AOL. There is a book out on the market that is just about google, yet this book gives all the vital information about google and much more, without wasting as much time on their life stories and such. When you are done reading this book, you will know how and why google has become the global net-hegemon that it currently is, but also, why older sites like alta-vista succeeded only temporarily. Great book to understand the search engine world.

Its an excellent book which looks at how search has evolved as a part and parcel of computer parlance. In the process, it shows how Google has become what it is today. The constraints based on which the two graduates developed the super effective algo became the market drivers for them. How Google tried to be "ethically correct" while choosing the ad space marketing scheme.
It also talks about not so famous in terms of search., but people who really made ground breaking changes like the founder of goto.com(now overture.com) is good.

A fascinating history of new tech age or more specifically internet age

Thisis a history of search and search engines with a focus on Google. Battelle also discusses the social significance of search.

I found the most interesting part of the book to be the history of different search engine companies and how their attitude towards search changed over time. The basic overview of how search works might be interesting to people who do not know it already. The commentary on the effect of search had the potential to be interesting but was not -- it came across as scattered and not nearly as deep as Battelle was trying to make it sound.

I found the book engaging; Battelle clearly knows the subject. At the same time it was annoying to read. Battelle writes like a journalist and that style does not scale to a book. He is always looking for conflict between people and companies and uses too many cutesy stories. It gets tiring after awhile and makes the book feel shallow. Still, if you want to read a history of search companies, this is a good resource.

It fascinates me to think of the dawn of the search engine. Battelle recollects how search engines began and have evolved since. Information is readily available with the click of a button--and Google is the top contender. This search engine has branched out to bring users e-mail, blogs (yes, Blogger is Google's blog platform), shopping, and a wealth of other information and resources.

The only preface I have going into reading this novel is to recognize that it was written in 2005. In the world of literature, a seven-year-old book is still pretty young, but in the world of technology, this book was dead six years ago. In spite of outdated technology, it was a smooth read and maintained the interest of this nerd.