The Search review

Wendy M Grossman ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 16 Nov 2005

How many times a day do you use some kind of search to find information? Do you even know? Google, Wired co-founder and Industry Standard publisher John Batelle writes in The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, was not the first company to spot that search might be important enough to build a business on. It wasn't the first to pioneer the blank-page look: that was Altavista in its early days. It wasn't the first to come up with contextual, paid search advertising, either: that was GoTo.com, later known as Overture. It's easy to forget at this distance -- ten years of Internet time -- how many sites were competing for our attention back in the mid 1990s: remember Lycos, Excite, and Inktomi? Yet back then no-one, not even Yahoo!, thought of search as a destination site, merely as a feature on a portal that offered email and directories to make themselves 'sticky'.

The Search covers the history and future of the ubiquitous search box, from Altavista through Google's IPO and on to the prospects for Tim Berners-Lee's semantic Web. Devotees of Internet arcana will doubtless be disappointed at the lack of coverage of such pre-Web search efforts as WAIS (Wide Area Information Server, mentioned here only as Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle's first effort). But don't condemn the book on those grounds: Battelle has done an excellent job of researching the projects he does talk about and surveying the landscape.

Google, as Battelle recounts, avoided a lot of pitfalls others didn't. It was fortunate enough not to be corporately owned, unlike Altavista, which began life as a research project inside Digital Equipment Corporation, passed through a gaudy portal phase when DEC was bought up by Compaq, and wound up in a fire sale to Overture. Its broken-hearted creator, Louis Monier, now works at eBay. Google was also fortunate in its timing. Had it arrived earlier, it, too, would probably now be festooned with banner ads. Instead, the company decided to experiment with paid search, always thinking that banner ads were Plan B. By the time they thought they might need Plan B, the market had crashed, taking banner advertising with it. Google, in the end, prospered from the plan that seemed risky at the beginning.

It now seems extraordinarily obvious that the steady stream of words users type in as they try to find what they're looking for is valuable information that can be exploited. That insight led to paid search -- now the fastest-growing area of advertising -- as well as localised and personalised services.

But there's still a long way to go. A huge amount of electronic material attached to the Web remains invisible to search engines -- the contents of sites that are walled off by registration schemes, most people's own computers, commercial databases and so on. The essayist and software engineer Ellen Ullman once wrote that she'd never seen an owner of two databases who didn't want to hook them together. She could just as accurately have said that no-one ever owned a database -- of RFID trails, credit card transactions, ID card audit requests -- that didn't want to search it.

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