The Search

How Google & Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business & Transformed Our Culture

By: John Battelle

Narrated by: John Battelle

Length: 10 hrs and 1 min

Publisher's summary

What does the world want? According to John Battelle, a company that answers that question can unlock the most intractable riddles of both business and culture. And for the past few years, that's exactly what Google has been doing.

Jumping into the game long after Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, and other pioneers, Google offered a radical new approach to search, redefined the idea of viral marketing, survived the dotcom crash, and pulled off the largest and most talked about initial public offering in the history of Silicon Valley.

But The Search offers much more than the inside story of Google's triumph. It's also a big-picture book about the past, present, and future of search technology, and the enormous impact it is starting to have on marketing, media, pop culture, dating, job hunting, international law, civil liberties, and just about every other sphere of human interest.

More than any of its rivals, Google has become the gateway to instant knowledge. Hundreds of millions of people use it to satisfy their wants, needs, fears, and obsessions, creating an enormous artifact that Battelle calls "the Database of Intentions". Combined with the databases of thousands of other search-driven businesses, large and small, it all adds up to a goldmine of information that powerful organizations (including the government) will want to get their hands on.

No one is better qualified to explain this entire phenomenon than Battelle, who co-founded Wired and founded The Industry Standard. Perhaps more than any other journalist, he has devoted his career to finding the holy grail of technology. And he has finally found it in search.

For anyone who wants to understand how Google really succeeded, The Search is an eye-opening and indispensable read.

©2005 John Battelle (P)2005 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"This is an excellent, thought-provoking book." (Booklist)
"John Battelle has written a brilliant business book....All searchers should read it." (Walter Isaacson)
"This book ought to be called The Answer. As usual, John Battelle delivers insightful, thought-provoking, and essential reading." (Seth Godin)
"The book is a deeply researched and nimbly reported look at how search has defined the Internet and how it will continue to be a tremendous reflection of culture." (Publishers Weekly)

interesting in some places, boring in others

this book wise interest in some places. It was boring and dull in others. I'm not sure I'm glad i read it. But such is life!

Excellent

I have listed to both this title and "The Google Story". Both are good, but this one is better. I would recommend listing to this one first and the other second.

The History of Search: The Early Days - 2006

What did you love best about The Search?

Excellent telling of the history of search engines and the business they have become.

Any additional comments?

I would recommend listening to 'The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You' by Eli Pariser after this book to bring the listener up to date on where Search is currently at and where it is headed.

Very insightful

In the past collecting information about individuals has always been in the domain of government organisations, one of the points the book makes is that today this information is being collected in a very different manner because we as users see the value in using services believing that we are not making an personal sacrifices. The book outlines the enormity of the scope of the information being collected and how this data if it lands into the wrong hands may affect us in ways we could have never imagined.

Interesting hymn to google

This gives you a good background to the development of google, the author is obviously quite impressed. His voice isn't the most inspiring, but the story is good and kept me interested until the end.

What Search means to you

This book really opens your eyes to what Search may do in the coming decade to revolutionize our lives, and brings meaning to the phenomenon of a company growing from nothing to a huge power on the world scene. I would recommend it to anyone with any interest in the Internet, or in information systems. Although I was certainly aware of Google before reading this book, and used search frequently, after reading it I have a much greater appreciation in the possabilities of search, and what can be accomplished by advances in this technology.

Very intesting recent history of the Internet

Battelle's book provides a very interesting history of Google and it's predecessor technologies for searching and navigating the Internet. A good read for anyone interested in a general understanding of the landscape of the Internet. Battelle is not the best reader, he probably should have let a professional handle it...

Great info on the Search industry

The most comprehensive info on the search industry. Tells you the entire history all the way to the current undisputted king; Google and also the future ahead.

History or search and its possible future

Search gives a good history of the early players in search including offerings such as Veronica, Web Crawler, GoTo, AltaVista and others and pointed out where they stumbled along the way and lead to MSN, Yahoo, and today's dominance of Google. It reviews the key pieces of search including the link crawlers, the indexer, analyzing the indexes from and back to a page, and the secret sauce of each offering in its algorithms that determine what results are returned. The first third of the book covered the pre-Google days and the last two thirds mainly dealt with Google with a brief peek at the end of what the future could become.

Excellent!

Excellent reseach and story telling. It kept my interest all the way through. He was very well organized and kept the story line relevant. I wish I had listened to it/read it long ago.