In India, New Seat of Power for Women – Washington Post
Women in India, where sex-selective abortion has made men disproportionately more common in the population, women are leveraging their relative scarcity and making suitors pay for a toilet in their homes, thus preventing disease and improving health in rural and poor communities. The government-supported initiative has been far more successful than other programs, including one run by the World Bank.

How Mobile Phones Contribute To Female Progress In Developing Nations – Jezebel
Cell phones can provide stability for refugees and people in unstable political and economic climates, savings accounts for those with no access to banks, and business opportunities for aspiring local entrepreneurs.

Gross’s core insight, the one that now drives the entire search economy, is that the search term, as typed into a search box by an internet user, is inherently valuable – it can be priced.

This was a revolutionary idea, and it’s related to Chris Anderson’s core idea in Free, that of attention as a scarce commodity in the internet age. Gross figured out that you can make millions (or billions) of dollars with thousands or millions of transactions that net you a few cents each. The other important piece of Gross’s work with GoTo was a new business model where advertisers only paid when someone clicked through to their site, instead of paying for the basic advertising space, like you do in a newspaper or on TV. Gross realized that this model is significantly more accountable, and the accountability enables companies that might otherwise feel uncomfortable venturing into web advertising to do so, because if no one clicks, they haven’t lost anything.

So GoTo.com (which eventually became Overture) had a viable business model before Google ever did, partly because Larry Page and Sergey Brin were originally loath to mix organic search results and paid advertising.

Google eventually warmed to the idea, though, and created AdWords, which is at the core of its business model to this day. After that, AOL decided to use Google instead of Overture for its paid search results, which meant Overture lost a $50 million deal. That was the beginning of the end for Overture, which was sold to Yahoo soon thereafter. Today, Google pretty much gets the credit for pioneering the new business model. But Bill Gross is still inventing away, and after reading this chapter, I wouldn’t be surprised if another one of his creations changes the way we think about the internet yet again.

Anyway, the point of the Database of Intentions (Battelle points out, and I should too, that this isn’t a real thing- just a concept he named) is that the subset of the entire world’s population that’s on the internet is making the decisions for you. This was the revolution of Google: from search engines that made decisions about information to engines that used the decisions that people made to provide search results. Given this history, Bing seems to me like a step back at a time when the rest of the internet is hurtling forward.

(p.s. Thank you, WordPress, for saving this post automatically so that I didn’t lose anything when the computer I was working on suddenly shut down several minutes ago.)

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.