Understanding the technology and business behind online search engines

Posted on July 25, 2007
Filed Under Books |

The Search John BattelleIn his book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, Wired magazine editor John Battelle has done an incredible job presenting the history, technology and business of online search engines.

The book is not a historical documentary about Google but its focus is on the rather more generic idea of search. Battelle’s book paints a very clear picture of the importance of search in the past, present and future.

He surveys the rise and fall of many online portals and early search engines building up to an in depth review of Google’s short history. Google is the brainchild of two Stanford PhD students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who worked on a new search algorithm as part of a graduate student project and ended up the owners of a multi-billion dollar company that in less than a decade has grown to employ more than 15,000 people. Sergey and Larry’s search engine with the simplistic landing page has become the most used and successful online search engine in the world.

But search engines today are more than just innocent service providers. As Battelle explains, online search engines collect a huge amount of information about each and every person using them. The end result is the creation of huge databases of the most complete profiles of people’s daily habits; Battelle calls this the click stream. All information searched for and accessed via the search engines is recorded giving these companies the ability to perfectly target advertising and services tailored to each individual user’s tastes. This phenomenon alone creates many serious privacy issues and may ease our transition to a future big brother society.

The book explores more than Google’s history, however. Battelle spends plenty of time looking more deeply into the concept of search and its impact on marketing, media, pop culture, international law, civil liberties, and our society in general. He concludes his book with speculation on what would constitute the perfect search.

I guarantee that once you start reading this book you won’t be able to stop; I highly recommend this book.

Comments

Leave a Reply




Your Ad Here