The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

I learned from The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture that it is thought that 30% of the web is porn. I was also reminded of the time before Google when most search engines would regularly have porn sites in their results of even the user had the most benign of intentions. That pretty much stopped once Google and its vastly superior indexing algorithms appeared on the web and well, then pretty much took over.

John Battelle begins the book not the conventional way that I have done by mentioning the superior results that Google first brought but reminds us that every search begins with an intention and that Google has, in its sea of servers, the largest database of human wants the world has ever seen. This is just one of the reasons why Google is increasingly becoming a conduit for business on the internet and why businesses like Amazon are getting into the business of search.

This book is more than a simple history of a business - and not just because Google is positioned to be more than just another company. At the moment, Google is the best "Yellow Pages" of the Internet but in the future it could very well become a new layer of Internet infrastructure. Ironically, after reading the book, I'm more wary of this future because Google now seems much more human to me. Recommended.