Search - the future of business, information, life as we know it?
 

I just read Search by John Battelle. He's the co-founding editor of Wired magazine, and an industry insider. This book is about search - Google and all it's predecessors and rivals. It's got an amazing history on each search engine, and the business/power plays behind them. It brings you entirely up to date - ok, maybe up to the date it was written - and forecasts the future of search.

Battelle points out just how revolutionary the concept of search is, and as a result, how revolutionary the internet is. The power that Google has at the moment is extraordinary, and yet, this is still the infancy of the information age, the tip of the iceberg.

I really loved this. As a wanna-be tech geek it was just tech enough to teach me something but not so tech that I couldn't understand it. Basic programming concepts are written in a very accessible way. What really moves the book are the various stories, from AltaVista's rise and fall to Google's IPO. As a full-fledged member of the internet community I was surprised at how much I didn't know about the technology and the business end. The cultural implications are staggering...

Yes, this is a book review, but definitely a book for Egg Heads and wanna-be Egg Heads like me. :cool: I highly recommend it!

Sounds worth looking up....

So are you creating the LoT book club? What's up for next month?

Sounds like a cool book. I'll have to check it out.
:)

LOL! Chris and I have joked about his since we've been "pushing" Murimaki books on LoTters for a while now. We recently had a great discussion with Traci after we all read "Kafka on the Shore" and it made me want more discussion of the like, but I prefer live disussions in the "salon" style mode rather than a written discussion. Personally, I get more out of it and I tend to participate more. But, I really dislike writing.

As is evidenced by your post count ;)

STFU

Sounds interesting. Does he go into the pre-internet post-digital search era? Librarians have been creating, theorizing, and maintaining massive electronic databases for decades (and the actual power of Google searching pales in comparison to what could be done on DIALOG and LEXIS/NEXIS)? Or does he just start with Yahoo?

I don't think I could ever participate in a book club - my tastes are very specific and I quit books that I dislike rather quickly. I don't read much fiction either...

He doesn't go into deep detail, but he does talk about the beginnings of search. Don't think he mentioned DIALOG or LEXIS/NEXIS, though. Even so, I think anyone interested in data retrieval of any kind (read: Librarians) would love this book. He really understands the implications of data made public. You should definitely check it out, Alex.

Edited for clarity.

I have just the opposite problem. I read everything and rarely quit books for any purpose. But, I find book clubs too limiting. They're reading Wicked over at MC which I read years ago and have no desire to revisit, so I'm not participating.

We have our own home bookclub that works great though. ;)

Thanks for the recommendation.

As someone who works in the search industry I see first hand the dynamic nature of the business and the challenges of the business side. The next "big thing" is local search.

The one thing Google has going for them is the integration of their name into the lexicon. The term Google has become a verb. Alta-Vista never had that, and while Yahoo tried ("Do you Yahoooooooooooooooooo?") it never took off.

In the industry, being second to Google is not a bad thing.

/ends my industry babble.

I will be checking out that book.