Knowledge is power » Books

Understanding the technology and business behind online search engines

Alpha — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 12:45:28 +0000

In 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.

Maximum insanity: how to survive a Klingon invasion!

Alpha — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 23:19:44 +0000

If we are fortunate enough to survive the upcoming robot uprising, then chances are that we are going to meet our maker when Martians invade. Okay, so it may not be Martians but Aliens from another distant planet if such beings actually exist. And if you believe Travis Taylor and Bob Boan then there is a high probability that Alien civilizations exist and it is only a matter of time before they decide to invade us. So, what best than actually be prepared for such an unfortunate event. Travis and Bob took it upon themselves to save us all by writing a guide for planetary defense, “An Introduction to Planetary Defense: A Study of Modern Warfare Applied to Extra-Terrestrial Invasion.” They analyzed current warfare practices and came up with a plan for defending the Earth when Aliens come knocking on our doors.

The authors are dead serious about their work. Start practicing guerrilla warfare because the authors figured out that since Alien technology would be far more advanced than ours, chances are that we will have to resort to mujahideen-type tactics in order to defend our home planet. Maybe Osama Bin Laden had it right all along and Al-Qaeda is nothing more than a network of concerned citizens of the Earth preparing for the unavoidable war against evil Alien nations!

Don’t have time to read but want to? Free audiobooks to the rescue.

Alpha — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 16:58:51 +0000

Let’s face it. Many of use would like to read more but we simply don’t have the time. Take for example our morning and afternoon commute to work; I spend on average 2 hours driving in traffic (if you can call it driving) which is time I could invest in reading. So what can one man do? Audiobooks are the answer.

Portable mp3 players have revolutionized the way we listen to music and are now also revolutionizing the way we read books. Just like iTunes.com is your one stop for online music, there are several websites that will allow you to buy audiobooks, i.e., books read for you. Better yet, why not start by downloading some classic books that are in the public domain. LibriVox is a non-profit website run by volunteers who record public domain books and make them available in mp3 format so that you can listen to them using your iPod, Zune or any other portable mp3 player.

LibriVox’s library is large and growing continuously; currently, there are nearly 600 books completed. Some titles that you will find on their website include Frank L. Baum’s “Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz,” Aristotle’s “Poetics,” Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.”

Enter the Babylon System

Alpha — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 03:55:56 +0000

Enter the Babylon System by Rodrigo Bascunan and Christian Pearce isn’t the easiest read, particularly for those not immersed in hip hop. It is, though, a passionate and illuminating discussion of the links (or lack thereof) between hip-hop music and gun culture. The two Canadian authors are disdainful of any analysis that blames gun violence op popular music. But they still don’t absolve rappers of their responsibilities as the voices of their culture, the stars who give guns their glamour.

Brian Bethune