Name: The Search
ISBN: 9781591840886

The Search

How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture• The Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek Bestseller• Finalist for the Goldman Sachs/FT Business Book of the Year AwardWhat does the world want? According to John Battelle, a company that answers that question—in all its shades of meaning—can unlock the most intractable riddles of business and arguably of human culture itself. And for the past few years, that's exactly what Google has been doing.But The Search offers much more than the inside story of Google's triumph. It's a big- picture book about the past, present, and future of search technology and the enormous impact it's starting to have on marketing, media, pop culture, dating, job hunting, international law, civil liberties, and just about every other sphere of human interest.

What Hacker News says

coglethorpeMay 2008

1. "The Wisdom of Crowds" by James Surowiecki

2. "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely

3. "The Search" by John Battelle

4. "Made to Stick" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

5. "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell

That should cover your trip. I've listened to all of them and really liked all of them. "Blink" by Gladwell is also good, but not as business related.

I would love to hear any other suggestions people have in this category.

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wmoreinNov 2007

That is definitely true. According to the Battelle book "Search" (good book by the way) and others, they tried to pitch themselves as a tech provider to Yahoo and others. That plan failed since no one was interested, and they went their own way.

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ReadmoreSep 2007

The Search by John Battelle. Then, just for fun, Neuromancer.

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willoremusApr 2018

You're right, I probably could have done a better job citing sources on these claims. You can read about Larry Page and Sergey Brin's early anti-ads stance in any number of books about Google, or in their own published paper that first introduced the idea for Google: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

I summarized a lot of the literature in this article a while back about how Google landed on its business model: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/when_big_businesses_w...

See in particular John Battelle's "The Search" (2005), Steven Levy's "In the Plex" (2011), and Doug Edwards' "I'm Feeling Lucky" (2011).

As for Facebook, there's probably less public documentation but I have been following/covering it from very early on and personally know a few of its earliest employees. Ads have never been Zuck's focus.

Again, as I say in this piece, the fact that these companies didn't set out to become advertising/surveillance juggernauts doesn't excuse anything. They absolutely are. But I raised this point about their mission and origins to help explain why it seems obvious to those companies' leaders that customers' data is not their primary product.

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danielhaFeb 2007

Advertiser heaven, absolutely.

Has anyone here read John Battelle's "The Search?"

He coins the term "Database of Intentions." He suggests some really provocative scenarios that is even more applicable now with recommendation engines.

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