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As founder of the Industry Standard magazine and a
co-founder of Wired, Battelle has been round the block
in both old and new media, and much of The Search’s
vitality stems from his own hands-on involvement in
the industry. There’s little of the usual business pomposity
about Battelle’s prose. Instead, Battelle writes in
a lucid and informal style, clearly in command of his
material but confident enough to not deluge the reader
with extraneous info to demonstrate his research. The
Search is, in short, refreshingly bullshit free.
The same can’t be said for the future of search engines.
With the realisation that the potential of search has only
just begun, there are real dangers ahead too. Ownership
of personal information is the major concern, with some
beginning to see the likes of Google not as a benign info
provider but a Big Brother like monitor of all online
movements. Criticism of Google’s “Don’t Be Evil”
moral code has also begun, with the company’s current
leadership of the search field making it walk point for
the whole industry. Gaming contextual advertising is
also an increasing problem, with clickfraud and spam
blogs on the rise, clogging search results with poor
quality websites. Each of the engines is working flat
out to find ways to counter these emergent problems,
and no doubt as they deliver solutions a whole new set
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of crises will arise; given the industry’s flux and mutability,
it’s hard to imagine a point at which there will be
no clouds on the horizon.
For now, though, search remains a huge success
story – Google may well be about to have its own
stock bubble popped, but the company is profitable
and unlikely to be knocked off its leadership perch by
Wall Street alone. Yahoo and MSN are moving into the
contextual ad field, each looking to get the competitive
edge to make advertisers and publishers alike use
their particular system. Most importantly, all three are
continually trying to find better ways to slice and dice
the Database of Intentions to give you what you want
quicker, simpler and faster. Google, to my mind, still
remains out in front for innovation, constantly testing
business boundaries and received wisdom, putting the
user experience first and working backwards. In the
last five years, it has continually gone its own way and
managed to take the industry with it. But Yahoo and
MSN and, indeed, people and companies we’ve never
even heard of yet, are not to be underestimated. John
Battelle’s The Search provides a brilliant illustration
that within five years everything in the search world
can change absolutely. It has done so already once – it
probably will do again. �
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