it’s all about search
Posted on | September 16, 2009 | No Comments
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
-Arthur C. Clarke
Google logo, by Mark Knol
So: in DPI-659 this week and next, we’re reading John Battelle’s The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. We’re reading and thinking about the way search is designed, the way Google has designed its business, and – eventually – the impacts of all this on media, communication, networking, and politics. Notice too, though, that we’re not just talking about Google: this is also about all those other companies that have completely reshaped how we think about making money and interacting with people in the internet age.
Battelle coined the term “Database of Intentions” to talk about the basic revolution in search: from a simple algorithm based on indexing of the text of websites to the massively complicated endeavor it is today. We contribute to the Database of Intentions every single time we use a service like Google. It can follow our clicks and see how we think about how we communicate. The classic example is “white house,” and Google has found that when most people type “white house” into a search engine, they’re looking for the executive branch of the US federal government. The aggregate of all of these searches and click patterns, Battelle explains, is this thing called the Database of Intentions that says a whole lot about who we are and what we look for when we use the internet- and especially search. It’s the sum of information that resides in a bunch of different places- Battelle highlights AOL, Google, MSN, and Yahoo as partial holders of all this data. It’s a thing that’s rife for abuse, but also for appropriate use to connect people with the information, services, and products they want, and that’s what Google has done.
It took a long time for anybody to stumble upon search as any kind of business model, much less a standalone workable one, and if you want to understand the journey from the early days of the internet to the revolutions of PageRank and AdWords (one of my cousins is an AdWords person at Google) and the dominance of Google in search, I recommend reading chapters 1-6 of The Search or coming to the Kennedy School to sit in on “Media, Politics, and Power in the Digital Age.”
As I was reading, I kept returning to the ideas Chris Anderson presents in Free (free Free audiobook here) and The Long Tail, about the scarcity of attention in the new online space and the sustainability of small businesses in niche markets targeting customers with significant specificity (explanation and graphic from Anderson here). Battelle talks about Google’s business plan in terms of “making billions a penny at a time,” and this is at the core of the idea of the long tail. There is clearly significant exchange of ideas here: in fact, Battelle co-founded Wired Magazine, where Anderson is the current editor-in-chief, although their tenures were years apart, and Battelle interviewed Anderson a few years ago at something called ecomXpo.
Google has been the beneficiary of the Google halo, which partly arose from its motto, “Don’t be evil” (quietly dropped in April of this year) but as Battelle points out, it’s a lot more difficult to draw the lines of evil when you’re a multibillion dollar international corporation making difficult decisions about working with the Chinese government to provide search to the world’s largest country. And, of course, the security concerns of the US government, codified in the Patriot Act, run right into the implicit trust Battelle correctly notes we place in companies with which we store our data and do our searching. So there are policy issues to be considered from many directions as we think about the future of new media and power in the internet age.
There’s lots more food for thought in the first six chapters of the book, particularly regarding Google’s approach to building its business, which has some interesting correlation to the 7S structure of organizations.
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