An Inquiry Into the Evidence Relating to the Charges Brought by Lord Macaulay Against Willia... Book

The word Search in large font size and the word "Google" just below it had attracted my attention towards this book. Initially, I thought this book is about Google and its impact on internet search but later discovered that the main focus of the book is search and understandably Google emerges as the central player.

This book is the revised edition which was published in 2006 and given the very nature of technology some of the technological stuff and rival players to Google discussed in the books have become dated. Nevertheless, I found this book quite interesting.

You don’t need to be a software engineer or a digital marketing professional to find search fascinating. All of us have been using search for personal, academic and professional reasons – whether it’s an academic project, finding the exact location of a restaurant, job opportunities, a book, information about a movie (the list is endless) – we have reached out to Google, Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, Goodreads, IMDB and so on. Searching the internet has become such an integral part of our daily existence that whenever we need any information or want to buy something we just go online. The author himself has shared about his search experience on “tempting fate” and “immortality”.

The author very succinctly tells us about “search” during the early days, the technological challenges of search, paid search, the profound impact of search on business and marketing, government & corporate firms trying to obtain user information and most importantly – the ultimate reward ---- the perfect search , to which the author has devoted an entire chapter, IBM's WebFountain etc.

Through this book, I got to know about a fascination character called Bill Gross – he was the brain behind GoTo ( a search engine which later became Overture and sold off to Yahoo) among many other tech innovations. Most importantly, he was the man who came up with the system of auctioning off certain search words to the highest bidder and performance-based model of online advertising – advertisers pay only when people clicked on the advertisement, this model with modifications have been adopted as the standard. Later, Google adopted this model came up their own AdWords but ensured that search results were more relevant.

Coming back to Google, the author tells us about Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s PhD days at Stanford, how the idea of Google came to their minds, the setting up of the company and its meteoric rise till the writing of his book. He has talked about their struggles in the early days – how they celebrated when they received their first funding by going to Burger King, their various strategic decisions, the superiority of their technology and much more. At the same time he has also written about certain unsavoury aspects of Google – how Google compromised with its principles to operate in China, apparent manipulation of their search results during a lawsuit etc.

We all know what influence Google has on search and by extension on online advertising. When we think about e-commerce most of us usually imagine behemoths like Amazon, Alibaba, Flipkart but there are so many small firms which depend upon the organic search results of Google – these are small businesses and can’t afford paid advertising. In 2003, when Google had tweaked their algorithm, many such small businesses had lost out on their business.

The author presents the story of Neil Moncrief, a seller of shoes for people with large feet, who totally depended upon the organic search result of Google for orders. His page had a good rank and business was fine but on 14th November, 2003 his phone stopped ringing. His store was not in the first hundred rankings. Imagine that – just before a critical holiday season his name has been wiped off the search results. Who goes beyond the results displayed in the first page of the search? He reached out to [email protected] and [email protected] but his emails went unanswered. This had happened to thousands of other small businesses. Google claimed it was only trying to weed out spammers but a few conspiracy junkies might have claimed that it was a move to get more people to sign into Adwords.

Battelle has written about Moncrief’s new boss – “His name was Google, and he made Ebenezer Scrooge look like a saint.”

I hope in the years that has gone by, Google has tweaked its algorithm such that similar incidents don’t happen again.

Whatever the business decisions of Google, none of us can deny the part it plays in our daily life. Not only just the search engine – we all depend upon Gmail, Google Chrome and a host of other Google services. Personally, I just can’t imagine a life without Google and I believe I speak for many if not most Internet users. I just hope it does not turn into the corporate monster so often portrayed in sci-fi and dystopian movies.

Overall, a good read but as I have already mentioned before this book is quite old so I would suggest some recently published books to learn about search and Google. I, myself, would certainly try to find such books.