Book Review: "The Search" by John Battelle

Last Friday I was pleasantly surprised to find Amazon box with John Battelle's new book The Search inside waiting for me at home. I preordered it some 5 months ago after I first found out about it while reading John's Searchblog at www.battellemedia.com. I met John for the first time at Web 2.0 conference in SF last year and was very impressed by his knowledge of the business of media, technology and search. We talked when we launched www.become.com early this year which he wrote about on http://battellemedia.com/archives/001316.php.

I just finished reading the book last night and really enjoyed reading it so I thought that I would write my first ever book review on this blog. Here it goes:

This is by far the best book ever written about search engine industry. John has done an awesome job in interviewing and researching all the key people and issues around search engine industry and technology. John himself is not a technologist, as he is the first to admit, but he is a very talented researcher, writer, journalist, and an entrepreneur. He analyzes, with keen insight, the rise of search engine business starting from Webcrawler in 1994 through to Google in 2005. He also delves deep into the underlying algorithms and pay-for-performance click advertising business model that lead to the multibillion dollar businesses of today. I greatly enjoyed reading this book and thought that it was so informative and educational for anyone in search engine industry that I bought 40 copies to give to every single employee at Become.com. We are still in phase one of search and it will be part of every day life for all Internet users. This is an excellent book not only for people who are in the industry but also those interested in learning about the dynamics of Internet business and impact of search on our society. As an entrepreneur in the search industry, I could not agree more with John on the importance of vertical search engines that will take search to the next level into the future.