The Search: Google's Transformational Effect on Society

 

The book that I am writing about is The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Battelle, cofounding editor of Wired. It is about how the advent of Google and Web search engines in general changed our society and how they might change in the future. It was written in 2005, which means that a lot of the information that it is based on is outdated. However, the fact that it was written 16 years ago means that its predictions about the future can be evaluated. (For context on the time period, it was written after Google Maps was released but before Keyhole Earthviewer was rebranded and re-released as Google Earth and very much so before Google Docs, Drive, etc.).

The first part of the book is mostly about the history of search engines and Google and some background information about how search engines work. It then moves on to the history of the pay-per-click advertising model employed by most search engines. Building on that economic point of view, it continues with how that model might expand in the future. (It had previously been noted that Google's mission of organizing the world's information continues to expand). For example, starting on page 167 the author describes a hypothetical future where DVR recording history and Web search history are merged and used to present highly relevant advertisements to the user while they are watching television, which seems quite like YouTube today.

Leaving the economic thread, the book next turns to the topic of privacy, both with regard to Google knowing too much about its users and the possibility of the government forcing it to turn over information. Google's motto "Don't be Evil" unsurprisingly plays a large role in the discussion, as well as the now-expired USA PATRIOT Act. It proceeds to the story of Google's IPO, which included various lawsuits and much posturing to try to prove that Google did not intend to become a "conventional company" (actual quote from the opening of their letter to prospective shareholders).

The final chapters focus on how Google might change over time and what the "perfect" search engine would look like. At the end of Chapter 10 (page 250), the author states that Google is in a position to provide "every possible service that might live on top of a computing platform," giving word processing and spreadsheets as examples, along with some the he calls "futuristic", such as video on demand, personal media storage, and distance learning. The final chapter is about what the "perfect" search engine would be. The author's concept is a search engine that gives exactly the right answer, which would of course be dependent on who the searcher is. He examines various ideas that might lead to such an engine, such as adding more and more things to the Internet (realized by the present Internet of Things), personalized search (at the time of the book's writing the concept of search history was just coming out), and various other possibilities.

I found this book to be quite interesting. The fact that it was written 16 years ago made it rather outdated, but its predictions about both privacy and technological advancement are startlingly accurate. I would encourage you to read this thought-provoking analysis from an earlier time of an issue that has recently become rather prominent.

-Nibaw