The Search

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
$17.13 @ Amazon »

The Search is the best thing I've read on the search industry. I've followed the industry news for years, and I've used both AdWords and AdSense, and The Search has the most lucid explanations of the financial mechanics of the industry I've found.

More than that, Battelle captures why search is a transformative business and he describes the future of search in a number of concrete ways. (You can read an excerpt from the chapter Perfect Search on John Battelle's blog.)

Of particular interest for me was the comparison between Yahoo's editorial approach to search and Google's "objective" approach. I put objective in quotes because the design of algorithms is, I think, becoming a kind of editorial function. In the case of Google News, for example, we want the algorithms to subject to the same kind of scrutiny and transparency as an editor.

(This is tangential as well, but I can see the ethics of findability becoming a burgeoning topic in practical ethics. Google explicitly introduced a moral dimension to search with it's "don't be evil" motto. And it has claimed the moral high-ground in the debate over mixing paid and organic listings. The Search discusses these thing in some length, and it's clear that Google takes the ethics of search seriously (this is evident in the section that discusses Google's expansion into China). Philosophy students take note: your next paper could be on Google.)

John Battelle's writing is another strong point. He doesn't have the Gladwell's breezy style, but I also didn't get the feeling that important details may have been left out in service of the story. The reporting and analysis are solid. Battelle is persuasive about the cultural importance of search, and his future of search riffs seem more than plausible.

The Search could've been yet another corporate bio--with access to Larry, Sergey, Eric Schmidt, Terry Semel, and bunch of other major players, that book would have been a solid triple. But it digs into much deeper trends at the cross-roads of technology, media, and people's most basic desire for information (as well as the multi-billion dollar companies that have staked out that space).

So, thumbs up. The Search is also a good complement to Ambient Findability.