The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed our Culture
John Battelle's The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed our Culture (New York: Portfolio, 2005) is a rewarding and frustrating read. Rewarding for the historically minded because Batelle chronicles the development of "search" and how, as the subtitle indicates, it has changed both business models, especially those of advertising, and cultural expectations about information. His history is especially interesting in outlining the series of business and technical developments since the mid-20th-Century that made it possible for Google to become an eponym. Frustrating because it has a journalistic, breezily or chattily anecdotal insider chumminess (as opposed to the more formal name dropping of academic writing) and has a bloated quality that suggests it would have been better off in the hands of a strong editor as a series of journal articles (as opposed to the bloated quality of academic writing that suggests a book would have been better off in the hands of a strong editor as a series of journal articles).
Those knowledgeable about search technologies and their relationship to questioners and information sources will be able to read the last chapter, "Perfect Search," to get an idea of the themes and concerns that animate the book. This last chapter details how the author and others see search developing, and it got me to thinking about a college library's business model, that is, about the library as an organization that tries to "sell" resources to students and faculty. It also got me to thinking about the discussions we have been having about the future of the catalog, metasearch, the format of our collections, etc. Batelle makes a good case that new tools for divining questioners’ interests and intentions, like Google, and new tools for structuring and organizing knowledge add up to a new culture of information creation as well as information seeking, one that is modeled on but transforms the work of librarians and libraries. Ch. 8, "Search, privacy, government, and evil," is a useful exposition of the social issues raised by the availability of so much information for searching.
--Bob Kieft is Director of College Information Resources and Librarian of the College at Haverford College
