I first used the internet sometime around 1993, when it seemed gopher was still where all the good information was, or maybe I just wasn't in the know since most of my direction was from a deadtree book of listings. I quickly grew to love the internet in college, and Altavista was the clear best choice for search until someone introduced me to Google and I saw it was clearly better. I have been paying attention to things technical and their social ramifications since 2000.

Thus there was not a great deal of material I hadn't already been exposed to, though I did enjoy history up to 2000--that was the best part of the book IMO. Battelle is a journalist covering the business side of technology, so there was nothing to be found where I was hoping for some insights into Google's technical development. Of course, Battelle has a slant toward financial matters, and that tinged the book an ugly color for me.

Battelle claims the book is really about search and not Google. Please--the book is a history of Google with Battelle's speculations about future technology, and it's rather schizophrenic in that respect. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but there is something missing, and I think it stems from Battelle's bias towards things financial. What is missing is that Battelle cannot see past the culture of consumption, of corporations controlling their customers. His examples seem to be based on an underlying assumption that it is always a customer searching for something to consume. Even if the thing to consume is information, Battelle seems to have a complete lack of understanding of the concept of free. One example is a pregnant couple being offered a coupon for a stroller as a result of having given up their search/browsing/viewing history and watching ads in return for free tv/internet. Battelle portrays the wife as pestering the husband, causing marital friction, and along comes the corporate internet to save the day--disgusting.

Another of Battelle's examples turns the situation on its head. In a situation right around the corner, a shopper at Whole Foods uses a device to scan a wine label and the internet provides him with the information that the price is nicer at a shop on the way home. The trouble is that this is a bubble, supporting only the techno-elite. Surely something would be done if such devices became mainstream. Whole Foods would preemptively present such a user with a digital coupon in an attempt to keep the sale. Worse yet, it becomes valuable for the store to know you are a shopper with such a device--if you'll only divulge the information, perhaps let your device interface with the store's sensor network, you will get significantly different prices. This is like a technologically advanced Randall's card. Randall's in Texas have a card whereby you divulge your information and allow your shopping history to be tracked in exchange for significant dollars off your bill--but actually the situation is that the prices are simply unreasonable unless you participate in their system. Will we see a future where shopping without allowing access to your gizmo results in unreasonable prices? Will it become necessary to have such a device? Combine this scenario with Jonathan Zittrain's thoughts in his book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Battelle's scenario becomes bleaker as corporations use pricing to make it increasingly painful to shop without granting access to information from whatever gizmo they have produced and locked down such that you don't really have control over its functionality. And if that gizmo is produced by Apple, the masses will say "thank you sir, may I have another?" Perhaps corporate greed actually saves us in the end as no single corporation can put all the pieces of the puzzle together, or else, so help us, our government is capable of doing the right thing. Bleak indeed.

Indeed, the cover of this book indicates that it has won several awards for best business book. Battelle has single-handedly turned me off from business books. It is my opinion that Battelle's treatment of the societal impact and issues of search would easily be blown away by any author writing from a non-money-grubbing point of view and his treatment takes away from his coverage of Google which is not what it could be for lack of focus. Furthermore, the book grew out-of-date from the time Battelle finished it to the time it was published, as Battelle recognizes with a 15-page diving-catch update attempt at the end of the book. The downside of writing from a business perspective is that all but the most general predictions will go sour, and that is another reason I lament Battelle's insistence on trying to make the book more than a biography of Google.

Perhaps I should instead have read The Google Story, which apparently tells more of the human tale, the MapReduce and Google File System papers, and Google's PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings.

Other notes:
* I was surprised I couldn't remember ever having run across the Overture search engine.
* Battelle mentions the effects of 9/11 on Google, largely referencing a paper by Richard Wiggins, which is an interesting read on its own.
* Battelle briefly touches on the closed nature of Google's algorithms protecting its results from being spammy. He mentions Doug Cutting and Nutch. Nutch was pulled into Hadoop, which basically provides Google clone technology (obviously missing a bunch of proprietary stuff) with an Apache license.
* American Blinds sued Google over their trademark being sold as AdWords. After four years of litigation American Blinds settled worse off than it started: Google conceded nothing and paid nothing, while American Blinds had two of its trademarks thrown out as unenforcable and paid sanctions to Google for mismanaging the discovery process.
* Geico brought suit with a similar claim which was thrown out, but Geico also objected to the use of Geico in an ad's text. It appears Google settled on the minor claim. American Airlines sued on the same grounds, and also settled the case. No legal precedent has been set. Selling trademarks as AdWords is similar to putting Coke and Pepsi on the grocery store shelf next to each other. There is potential for shadiness including a trademark in the text of an ad, but I would expect the advertiser and not Google to be held responsible.
* I was curious what Google's ad deal with the Da Vinci Code movie was. It is still up here.

Even though the info in this book is now outdated; it still serves as an inspirational story even today.

This is an old book by now, but covers how search engines work and the story of Google's creation. It was educational but a bit slow and a bit tedious to read. Overall I still liked it though.

I love this sort of startup forensics. This one is from 2005. The first few chapters gamely but disaffectingly develops a case for the importance of your ‘clickstream’ (your search history) as the source of all knowledge — not far off, but no longer awe inspiring in 2024 — but from there things get more interesting, as Battelle examines the tug of war among search technology innovators in the late 90s and early 00s.

It’s honestly incredible to read a commentator 20 years ago pooh-pooh the idea of digital video as a possible next frontier for Google in the time before the advent of YouTube — I felt real empathy and secondhand embarrassment — ‘what, is digitising your box of VCR tapes really going to be the next big thing?’ Kind of. And only to the tune of a $32B a year business, but how could he have guessed?

Every day, with a click, hundreds of millions of people search: for news, for deals, for jobs, for love. Google has become the primary gateway for instant knowledge. Its archives are, increasingly, the “database of the world’s intentions,” to use John Battelle’s apt phrase. Battelle lucidly explains the search technologies (such as PageRank, kind of an instant measure of webpage popularity) that fueled Google’s rise to dominance. He also traces the personal histories and goals of its founders. The book appeared four years ago, but most of Battelle's explanations remain valid. (Jeff B., Reader's Services)

Even though this book is quite old in computer terms (2005) it gives you a good summary of how. . . and why search engines work. I learned a lot about how Google and Yahoo make their money. It was really interesting and not too technical.

Fascinating. I was only few years behind the curve (which is to say, I did not find it on sale for three years) but once I was on board, they took me on a hell of a trip. I am fascinated by technology but am somewhat tech impaired. I certainly use the internet and have been a huge Google fan for years but never considered where they came from or what the search engine landscape was like before they arrived. I don't know how informative this was as a business book but for the casual reader and casual computer user, tremendously interesting. Someday, this will be taught as a history book.

If you have any interest in search or how Google came to be, this is fascinating and relevant even 12 years later. Of particular interest to me was how Bill Gross invented what would be Google's AdWords model: he was running multiple companies that desperately needed good, qualified traffic, and realized that he'd be willing to pay far more for differentiated traffic than the 5-7 cents he was paying for bad traffic via banner ad clicks. It was obvious to him (way back then) that search engines could generate this differentiated traffic, and so he started GoTo.com with the model that Google would later copy.

A history of 'search' and how important it has become in the information age. Doesn't just focus on Google but also looks at other attempts at making sense of the vast ocean of materials we have in the digital world. Informative.

It's about how search engines emerged, with main focus on Google history.

This book marked a transition from a world where people went to internet not really knowing what to expect, to an era when the people expect that the internet has answers to every single question that they have.

I have had this book for over a year but I just started adn finished reading it (read along with Audible is my style) this weekend. I should have read it sooner. Lot's of great info on the history of search. I though I should finally read it after doing some blog posts about the state of SEO. Luckily, I was not too far off on some of the assumptions I made (or maybe just read/heard somewhere else can cannot remember where).

I wish John talked a little more about the browsers wars throughout the book between Netscape and Microsoft, and even later about Firefox, since they are tightly woven into search.

If you want to understand the history of search engines, and the start of Google, this is an essential book. If you don't care about that stuff, it's not for you (even though it still is really interesting)