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Really great book about search engines and Google

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

October 10, 2005 [2709 views]

A new book, The Search, by John Batelle is well worth reading if you are at all interested in ecommerce. John Batelle was co-founder of Wired and founder of the Industry Standard so he certainly has a detailed knowledge of the industry. And this is more than a book about Google...

The Search John BatelleThe Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, John Batelle, 2005

The central idea is that search is becoming the "operating system" for the web and that Google has understood this better than its rivals (MSN and Yahoo).

Here are a few of the lessons I took away from this book:

  1. Searches are a direct indication of people's needs and wants
  2. Responding to these needs and wants is very important
  3. Search engine algorithms try to match needs to sites that satisfy these needs
  4. Pay per click advertising allows companies to pay to be shown in response to expressed needs
  5. Matching needs to sites via advertising is very efficient (perhaps the most efficient form of advertising out there)
  6. The Google PageRank algorithm is probably the best out there for the moment but better algorithms (based perhaps on successful clicks within organic results) are on their way
  7. Soon TV, broadband, music, books, newspapers and mobile will be searchable in the same way - everything searchable from everywhere
  8. Sites that control searching will control most of the ecommerce market (introducing buyers to sellers)

This is a must read book!

Click to find The Search on Amazon.co.uk

Recent comments:

On October 11, 2005 at 1:47 PM, Bharat Gosai wrote:

The book sounds interesting, maybe this will help on the side of research for my project.

Thanks,
Bharat

Jonathan replies: It is really excellent - finished it last night. The idea of a search engine being the "sum of all our intentions" is very powerful.

On February 3, 2006 at 2:56 PM, Mitul wrote:

A really interesting article...

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6034666.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=zdnn

If I recall correctly, we had a lecture on 'Google' storing search keywords that are typed in by users....

These results are kept and (could be sold to ecommerce companies) or even worse they could be used as evidence in the court of law! The irony of it is, even if you disable or opt out of the Personalised Search - by Google they still hold all your information by your IP address...

Jonathan is there a way whereby you are anonymous on the Internet or can you have some control of what is stored about you/your computer etc?

Jonathan replies: There are all sorts of ways that people can hide their tracks online including passing HTTP requests through an anonymising proxy server. Some would be expensive. I think it is better to be aware of what is going on.

What do you think?






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