September 09, 2005 | Battelle Review 2.0

My review of John Battelle's The Search ran in an abbreviated version in today's Wired News. It can be found in all its shortness here.

It started off as a much longer piece -- some 1,300 then 1,100 words about Battelle's fine book.

I managed to get it just on the short side of 800 words, which was trimmed down further for publication..

For those of you that care, here's the full review (the 800, not 1,100 word version):

After the internet boom turned to bust, the curiously blank front of Google stood out as a shining anomaly in the ruins, an interactive Victorian gazing glass that seemed to foretell the Web’s second future.

John Battelle, a longtime tech journalist, became fascinated with what he glimpsed and spent three years wandering Silicon Valley, talking to the wizards, the investors and the nay sayers

His new book, The Search (Portfolio, $26), is a surprisingly gripping story of hackers turning insights about informational conundrums into billion dollar businesses and corporate behemoths battling to shape the web to meld with their profit models.

At the same time, Battelle shows how search is pushing technology towards the dream of artificial intelligence, while thousands of small businesses thrive and die by the whims of search engine algorithms, and an unorganized consortium of non-profits, bloggers, and corporations are rebuilding the Library of Alexandria in a digital, distributed and democratic form.

Battelle, who launched one of the internet's seminal business magazines, The Industry Standard and co-founded Wired, is certainly qualified to tell the story of how pure search triumphed over bloated portals and in the process, revitalized the dream of a revolutionary wired world.

With the exception of a dry, early chapter on the mechanics of search, Battelle's The Search yields impressive results, pairing a reportorial eye for detail with a evangelical drive to make his audience feel the import of the search revolution.

"Search is no longer a stand alone application, a useful but impersonal tool for finding something on… the World Wide Web. Increasingly search is our mechanism for how we understand ourselves, our world and our place in it. It's how we navigate the one infinite resource that drives human culture: knowledge."

Battelle is at his journalistic best in his chapters on Google’s early days, the travails of an oversize shoe merchant devastated by a change to Google's ranking methods and the story of Overture's Bill Gross, who started a search engine and sold it for $1.6 billion, yet to this day, rues a single decision that might have kept him from the laurels bestowed upon Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

The latter is one of the many tales in The Search that center on business models – in Gross's case, arbitrage.

Business models fascinate Battelle, who at one point asks rhetorically, "after all, what are publishers but content-based intermediaries between a customer and an advertiser."

The saving grace for lay readers is that Battelle conveys the excitement of a counter-intuitive idea and explains business models clearly.

Despite that talent, The Search at times feels like a internet business theory primer, and passages such as the one detailing how future search technology will help shoppers from paying too much for Merlot can feel like retreads of pre-bubble hype.

Those occasions come when both Battelle and the reader lose sight of the reason why Google is so loved, hated and dissected.

In short, Google is closest thing to a deity on the Internet.

It is powerful, whimsical, arrogant, omniscient and secretive. It asks us to trust that it is not evil, even as it knows more about many of us than our friends do.

It told Wall Street and the world it was not interested in short-term profits.

The company handed the world a free gift and then later, figured out how to make money.

Its homepage, along with GMail and Google Maps, brought graceful design back to the internet.

Ironically, Google's technological insight into search, the famed PageRank algorithm, saved search from spammers by finding that the web has a human order.

What's revolutionary about this approach is that Google figured out that every time people add links to the web, they are adding intelligence to the web, which makes Google a god created collaboratively by everyone with a homepage.

Despite his business model obsession, Battelle is also fascinated by the cultural ramifications and promises of Google and ubiquitous information.

He bookends The Search with chapters teasing out the cultural meaning of our online lives, our searches and the paths they take us across the internet.

That participation underlies the concept of Web 2.0, which re-imagines the web as a cacophonous metropolis, not a strip mall.

Battelle finishes by riffing on the possibility of a database of the world's knowledge, built with meta-data, ubiquitous blogging, trackable devices and fuzzy folk tags.

Together, Battelle posits, these might transform the search box into a "reference librarian with complete mastery of the entire corpus of human knowledge."

"Perfect search—every single possible bit of information at our fingertips, perfectly contextualized, perfectly personalized—may never be realized. But the journey to find out if it just might be is certainly going to be fun."

The same could be said of Battelle's Search—not perfect, but a great journey.

Posted by Ryan Singel at September 9, 2005 05:43 PM

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