Book Review
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The Search - How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.Most compelling thought:What started out as a smart filer, grew into a huge and swift librarian, and will go on to be a wise and omniscient god that knows us better than we know ourselves. Buy this book for: Either people who are interested in Web related issues or world economy, or people who are interested in signs-of-the-times studies. |
John Battelle
John Battelle easily ranks among the best informed people in the web-based industry. Apart from being a prolific writer for various publications, he is program chair for the Web 2.0 conference.
A brief review of:
The Search
In The Search John Battelle looks at one of the Internet's most defining features: search engines and the database they are building. More than just a handy tool to find what we want, search engines log our wishes into a vast library of human desire. "Link by link, click by click, search is building possibly the most lasting, ponderous, and significant cultural artifact in the history of mankind; the Database of Intentions."Never before has mankind's collective mind been so chartable. Search data vaults are turning into an anthropological gold mine, or perhaps even a New Testamentary temple, with every PC a stone (1 Pet 2:5; 2 Cor 6:16). As Battelle says, "Search has about it a whiff of the mysterious and holy," his book becomes fiercely interesting for people who study Biblical evolution or latter day prophesies. For all the others, The Search is a glimpse out the window of a very fast moving train to a destination that can now only be guessed at.
The Search is an amusing and clever book. It opens on meditations about search as a phenomenon, swirls off into the so-far-history of Google and ends with the inevitable prognosis of what may lay ahead: every device a node of an inescapable web, with search and search-wisdom tied into every node. For readers who want to keep up with what our world is all about, The Search is an essential read.
