The Search

Subtitle: how Google and its rivals rewrote the rules of business and transformed our culture

John BATTELLE call no. 306.406 BAT

I wanted to read the Google story especially about their business model and found this book instead. It, the author says, is not about the business end of searching, but the act of searching and how that has been transformed by google.

The author is a founder of Wired magazine so he may know what he is talking about. Still reading.

29 June 2007
Turned out to be a pretty good book afterall. I tend to forget the early days of the internet when there was no such thing as a search button. Now it's one of the necessities of life. And this is what the book is about... how Search for information has become part and parcel of our lives, and how it will or may dictate how we live our lives. Google's business model is paid Search.... us searchers don't pay of course, but advertisers do. And although it maintains that its Search results are independent of advertisement, one has to suspect. And its algorithm has the ability to have a very long tail, remembering things you look for and linking to other areas. This is itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Let me explain:

Battelle talks about Search and Immortality - through a track of clickstreams (roughly translated into a person's search history) - the information from one person's search can lead to another, thus building leaf upon leaf into a giant, subject-specific database. Already this is kinda happening with Mozilla's history page. Imagine the time saved if you could go through the search history of someone else before you who had searched the web for a similar subject.

Google and other competitors have only touched about 6% of the information out there in the web. The future is scary but tempting.

Battelle has a website. http://battellemedia.com/

A bit of trivia: Google's Page Rank algorithm, the very basis of its search tool is a patent held by Stanford University because Larry Page and Brin were grad students working the algorithm in the dorm rooms of Stanford. They license Page Rank till 2011.

Another bit of information is with all these clickstreams building up giant databases, wouldn't it be a good idea to start archiving material, lest they disappear? Google's cache is good for the moment, but how wonderful it would be if missing pages could be found in a site like Internet Archive? For who know? This might be the final source of information - as the web spreads wider and deeper will the information be more temporal?