Added Value
The Search by John Battelle
The term search was one of the first useful services to inhabit the Internet and later to become one of the first applications to adopt an actual business model. At the beginning of The Search, I learned quite a few things of value. First John Battelle, the author, explains that, “The Database of Intentions is simply this: the aggregate results of every search every entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result” (Battelle, p.6). I felt this was something of importance considering I was not really sure the point of having an entire book on searching for things on the internet. Come to find out that this is a significant cultural artifact in the history of humankind. It holds massive amounts of data that grows, “crawls” and expands daily.
John Battelle is an exceptional writer that discusses Google and search in general. He writes it from a business like perspective and tries to help the readers understand how Google is on top today, but to keep in mind that they were the latecomers and have grown extremely fast. It all began on September 7, 1998; Google Inc. was formally incorporated with Page as CEO and Brin as President. These two founded Google while attending Stanford University graduate school of computer science while hacking and just doing a research project. It is interesting how they came to the name “Google”. It was named after googol, which I have learned is the term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.
Overall, The Search was at times dry, but it seemed to give a pretty good overview on the term search and why it is virtually everywhere on the World Wide Web. This book has inspired me to think bigger and look at the broader view of search and how it’s not just about Google, but about the entire internet and the way we search. And finally the question, Is this book of value? Honestly… Of course this book is of value. Anyone who uses Google on a regular basis should read this book. It explains the secret of how and why things work. It’s not magic, its genus. However, this book is not entirely about Google. It teaches us about many other people who are brilliant and basically know how to take initiative. For instance, I really enjoyed the story behind Bill Gross. He was a born entrepreneur, and incredible man. He was one of the people that got involved with Google early on and helped them grow to 3 billion in 5 years. This book discusses the life of Google, the ups downs, and struggles that this company had to go through to succeed. Search is changing industries today, and as The Search states, tomorrow as well.
The Search