(Continued) Book Review:
The Search by John
Battelle
Batelle discusses how Gmail—Google's free email service—caused
quite a stir when users started seeing contextual ads alongside
their supposedly private correspondences. The ads were so relevant
that people couldn't help but believe that Google was reading their
email! This raises all kinds of red flags, not just about Gmail, but
about search itself.
You'll see a search-based business model that may reduce or
eliminate your cable bills and help you turn cost centers in your
business into profit centers. Is shopping a search application? How
are blogs and RSS feeds changing the landscape of search?
The message is clear—get relevant content up on the Web,
lots of it, and do it quickly! That
will attract the search engines. They will bring you targeted
traffic and you will concentrate on converting those visitors into
customers.
Search will be in almost every device, including the nearly two
billion mobile cell phones and PDAs, and anything else in which we
can put a computer chip, including your suitcases, your cars and
even your cars keys, and every product
on the shelves in stores. If you want to sell a product or a
service, you'd better post it online, because that's how your
customers will find you. Dave Taylor of
AskDaveTaylor.com calls this
"findability" in his informative book
The Complete Idiot's Guide to
Growing Your Business with Google, which we'll review in a coming
issue of
The Deitel Buzz Online.
Trivia questions: Why did Google offer specifically
$2,718,281,828 worth of their stock in their IPO? What's a Google
dance" and a "Google bomb?" What's "Google juice," "Google whacking"
and Google Zeitgeist?" Who's the "GoogleGuy?" What does the "Page"
in "PageRank" really stand for?" What are A9, Alexa, Backrub, the
Database of Intentions, the Force of the Many, del.icio.us, DMOZ,
Flickr, the long tail of search queries, Nutch, RDF, SERP and Y!Q.
Who owns the patent on the Google search algorithm? Who created the
business model that has made Google so successful? What is the
significance of mesothelioma in the discussion about paid search?
Why was paid search initially considered unethical? You'll get
answers to all of these in
The Search.
How is Google changing the rules for content-based industries
like book, magazine, music and movie publishing? Battelle argues that
content providers need to expose their content to search
engines to be "part of the conversation" or risk becoming
irrelevant. Will copyright and trademark issues prevent Google from
achieving it's goals of indexing the world's information and making
it accessible? What happens when an AdWords advertiser buys keywords that
are other company's trademarks—a practice that Google currently
allows and would have a heck of a time blocking? The courts are
grappling with the legal complexities of this issue.
If you believe that Google is crucial to the future of business
and world commerce, you should read this book to familiarize
yourself with the growing array of Google's services, including:
AdWords, AdSense, Blogger, Froogle, Fusion, Gmail, Google Answers,
Google Deskbar, Google Desktop Search, Google Maps, Google News,
Google Print, GoogleScout, Picasa and many more. Lots of these are
currently free services with no apparent business model. Just wait!
What's the semantic Web? How will it change search? What about
personalization and localization? How are projects like The Internet
Archive "adding a time axis to the Web?" And what exciting new kinds
of applications will that enable?
As you finish reading this review, ask yourself one very
important question, "Why should I care about 2bigfeet.com?"
John Batelle's informative, entertaining, anecdotal and deeply
incisive book
The Search is a great read.
He's hosting the upcoming Web 2.0 conference I'll be
attending in San Francisco. I can't wait to hear him speak!
