What does the world want? According to John Battelle, a
company that answers that question -- in all its shades of
meaning -- can unlock the most intractable riddles of both
business and culture. And for the past few years, that's

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

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

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." Somewhere in Google's archives, for instance, you
can find the agonized research of a gay man with AIDS, the
silent plotting of a would-be bombmaker, and the anxiety of a
woman checking out her blind date. 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

No one is better qualified to explain this entire phenomenon
than Battelle, who cofounded Wired and founded The Industry
Standard. Perhaps more than any other journalist, he has
devoted his career to finding the holy grail of technology --
something as transformational as the Macintosh was in the mid-

Battelle draws on more than 350 interviews with major players
from Silicon Valley to Seattle to Wall Street, including
Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric
Schmidt, as well as competitors like Louis Monier, who
invented AltaVista, and Neil Moncrief, a soft-spoken Georgian

Battelle lucidly reveals how search technology actually works,
explores the amazing power of targeted advertising, and
reports on the frenzy of the Google IPO, when the company
tried to rewrite the rules of Wall Street and declared "don't

For anyone who wants to understand how Google really succeeded
-- and the implications of a world in which every click can be
preserved forever -- THE SEARCH is an eye-opening and
indispensable read.


http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1591840880/

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