Snippets from The Search

I finished reading John Battelle's book The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture recently and I highly recommend it. But read it soon - as fast as things change in the search biz, this will get old faster than a ripe banana.

First, remember not to be fooled by  look alikes. Second, I already commented on one interesting statement that Battelle made on how online publishing has changed his reading habits.

From The Search

"Search as a problem is about five percent solved," notes Udi Manber, the CEO of Amazon's A9.com search engine. Five percent - and yes the search business has already blossomed into a multi-billion dollar industry. Search drives clickstreams, and clickstreams drive profits. To profit in the Internet space, corporations need access to clickstreams. And this, more than any other reason, is why clickstreams are becoming eternal. p. 12

 The bargain is this: we trust you not to do evil things with our information [gathered from tracking clickstream traffic]. We trust you will keep it secure, free from unlawful government or private search and seizure, and under our control at all times. ...That's a pretty large helping of trust we're asking companies to ladle on their corporate plate. p .15

...of all Americans who use the Internet, 85% use search engines. p. 25

...the world conducted 550 million searches a day in 2003, a figure it expects to grow by 10 to 20 percent a year. p. 26

Nearly 50 percent of all searches use two or three words, and 20 percent use just one. Just 5 percent of all searches use more than six words. p. 27

...it's a good idea to check your own name on Google, early and often. Given that just about everyone else you meet will be doing it anyway, it's just smart to get a picture of who your are in the world according to the index. p. 193

Googles' mission of organizing the world's information and making it accessible sets the company up to deliver nothing short of every possible service that might live on top of a computing platform = from mundane applications like word processing and spreadsheets (Microsoft's current bread and butter) to more futuristic services like video on demand, personal media storage, or distance learning. Many experts believe we'll store just about everything that can be digitized - our music, photographs, work documents, videos, and mail - on one massive platform - the Google grid. p. 250

...the search engine of the future isn't really a search engine as we know it. It's more like an intelligent agent - or as Larry Page told me, a reference librarian with complete mastery of the entire corpus of human knowledge. p. 252

Read the book. It is remarkably prescient in predicting Google's decision to offer censored searches in China. New corporate motto: "Don't be evil unless there is a profit to be made in being evil."

This book should make ya nervous. 

Comments

[Scott McLeod]

For those interested in the complexities behind Google's decision to censor itself in China, I highly recommend this article from Time:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1156598,00.html

I don't know how long the link will be active, but it's worth a read. Tough issues for a company that, as Doug notes, wants to "do no evil..."