John Battelle’s book, The Search, really opened my eyes about the value of search and about Google’s growth as a company. Battelle began the book by discussing search and the value it has to our society and to business. The first part of the book was a description of what search is and how it straddles marketing, media, technology, pop culture, international law and civil and how it has grown as a media business.
Battelle then took his readers through how a search worked: crawl, the index and then the serving of results. This was followed by a history of the technological history of the internet and the evolution of the importance of search as a business model and the companies which sprung up around it.
Battelle then spent time reporting on the dot.com era, when many companies were formed but struggled with how to produce revenue which would fund their bottom line. He discussed how in the beginning, companies whose main businesses were portals-like Yahoo and AOL- spent their time devising business models which kept people from leaving their sites. Hence banner ads were developed which may or may not have had any relevancy to the readers. An entire chapter was devoted to Bill Gross of GoTo.com and Overture, who according to the author was the person responsible for the theory of using search as a way to target advertising. His premise was that if he could deliver “good traffic” to advertisers, they would pay more to have consumers be exposed to their ad who might possibly buy their product. Gross also developed a ranking system by which prior clicks to a particular site would be a factor in how the search ranked that site. According to Battelle, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who started Google, stole Gross’s idea. Page and Brin implemented Gross’s way of ranking sites according to how many clicks that site had, not given higher rank to those where advertisers were to gain.
Battelle’s account of the growth of Google was very interesting. Page and Brin may have seemed arrogant, but they also appeared to understand, unlike Yahoo and AOL, that there was virtue in sending readers to other sites. When I read this section, I thought of Israel and Scoble’s lauding of blogs which linked readers to other sites. Israel and Scoble also came to mind when I read about Google’s problems with customer service for advertisers using AdWords. In their book the authors mentioned that Google didn’t allow its employees to blog. Although blogging isn’t the end all be all, I do have to wonder if Google did blog, whether their customer service problems could have been minimized.
Google’s corporate missive of “Do No Evil” clearly defines the company’s culture and the theme for how business both internally and externally should be done. As Battelle points out, the issues confronting Google post 9/11 does raise questions as to whether the slogan needs to be changed. It is sad to think that instead of searches being used to capture an anthropological snapshot of culture, searches now can be used to infringe on civil rights all in the name of national security.
Finally, one comment regarding the search history resonated with me. In the infancy of the web, people used the search engine to find what the web could offer. Now individuals use it to learn about and understand the topic on which they are searching. I can’t imagine life without it!
