Search

How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.


By John Battelle

This book is big picture about the past, present and future of search technology and the enormous impact it's starting to have on market, media and about every other sphere of human interest and how it has become gateway to the instant knowledge. Battelle calls it database of intentions : the aggregate results of every search ever entered, and every result list ever tendered and every path taken as result.Link by link,click by click, search is building possibly the most lasting, ponderous and significant cultural artifact in the history of human kind.In the second chapter, author discusses about how search engine works like the main pieces - crawl, the index, the runtime system or query processor and related software that connects user's queries to the index and some alogorithms.The author gives some insight into who searches the web,why, where and when and how search economy works based on paid ads. The author give history of search from Archie days and then Alta-vista, Excite, Yahoo, AOL, MSN and Google days which is quite interesting. The author has detailed chapter on how Google is born and how it emerged and survived in internet era and how it prospered from zero to billion dollar company in 2000-2004 period.Author has discussed about search, privacy issue and PATRIOTIC ACT in separate chapter.The book also gives information on search engine optimization(SEO),white hat SEO, black hat SEO and search engine marketing. The last chapter is equally interesting where author talks about perfect search and future of search , how it can be made more intelligent,clickstream, semantic web and can we give sentence like query or time bound query to search and idea about vertical engines - federated and domain specific like Global Spec and can we build sort of artificial intelligience into search ?
Overall it is informative book giving depth and breadth to an area we really do not think that much about.