Book Review:
The Search by John
Battelle
Review by Dr. Harvey M. Deitel
"Google is angling to become the de facto marketplace for all of
global commerce." [p248]
Did that catch your attention? It sure caught mine! I had no idea
that this may be the ultimate disposition of Google—the search
company that didn't even exist seven years ago, is now the world's
fastest growing company and, based on its recent stock price, the
world's most valuable media company.
This book is your key to understanding search from a business
perspective—past, present and probably well into the future. And
what a future it will be if John Battelle's vision comes to
fruition!
Batelle presents the history of search, helping us understand how
Google, a relatively late comer, has grown so quickly to dominate
the field. To the extent possible without being privy to the
details, he takes us inside Google's legendary PageRank
algorithm—one of the most carefully guarded secrets since the Coca
Cola recipe was formulated. And by the way, the "Page" in PageRank may
not mean what you think it does.
If you're an entrepreneur designing new Internet businesses, this
book will inspire you. It will make you think on a grand scale. But
it will also caution you about equally grand traps and
uncertainties. Nevertheless the search juggernaut appears to be
unstoppable.
The book is meticulously researched and carefully cited. Battelle interviewed 400 people including Google's founders Sergey Brin and
Larry Page, Yahoo's founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, and scores of
other search industry leaders. You feel that you're sitting in on
Battelle's frank conversations with these titans. The book is rich with
resources that you'll want to check out—which is so easy to do in a
Web-based world with search engines at the ready to guide you!
The book appears to be about Google, but it's really about the
whole search industry. Google gets its fair due as the company that
dominates the field—I've seen the following search engine market
share estimates at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in
San Jose: Google has about 50% of the market, Yahoo! about 25%, MSN
about 12% and Ask Jeeves about 6% (including the many smaller search
engines it owns).
Battelle argues that Amazon, eBay and even Microsoft may all be
surpassed by Google as it develops ever more intriguing and powerful
search-based and related applications. He sees search as the key to
global commerce, bringing buyers and sellers together worldwide. He
sees the Web emerging as the next major computing platform, with
Google owning dominant computing power and communications bandwidth,
challenging the role of Microsoft Windows on the desktop as a new
Web-based operating system appears. He sees Google focused like a
laser beam on indexing all of the world's information and making it
easily accessible to anyone who wants it, and he paints an
intriguing portrait of the effects of that effort on world business and the
global economy.
He digs deep into the business strategies of the leading search
companies and explains the profound philosophical differences
between Yahoo! and Google. He points out that Google's position will
be challenged by the extraordinary resources of Yahoo! and
Microsoft, and that it's not clear who will win this battle royale.
You'll learn about many of Google's products, especially AdWords and AdSense—it's two most significant sources of
revenue—which are helping enormous numbers of businesses and
individuals advertise economically and efficiently on the Web (AdWords),
and monetize their Web sites and their blogs with
text-based contextual advertising (AdSense). And you'll want to consider
Google's impending image ads capability. You'll understand the
difference between the "content attachment" and "intent attachment"
marketing models, and why the latter is so compelling in the search
world.
You may be fascinated to discover that the highest bidder on a
keyword in the AdWords program doesn't necessarily get the top
placement in search results. You'll learn who really invented search
and who really created the paid search business model (neither was
Google) and you'll understand the business opportunities in paid
search, subscriptions and referrals.
