The Search...as in the book title
While being one of millions of people doing Christmas shopping online, specifically at Amazon, they're suggestion system showed me an ad for The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Battelle, along with The Google Story by David Vise and Mark Malseed. Naturally, I couldn't resist!
So I read The Search first. Not surprising there was information I already knew. The beginnings of the Internet, the first attempt at search, search engine AltaVista and so on. What was fascinating, however, was how Battelle strung everything together. He connected all the dots. The Internet started as an academic means of connecting and sharing information. Search was a way to try and find that information but imperfect and quite frustrating. AltaVista was the best thing going but even it didn't spit out the most relevant information.
It sounds so simple, but the Google Guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, built an alogrythm for their PhD project that would crawl the Web and assign a rank to each page. However, what has become known as PageRank, assigned ranking based on the age-old academic citation process. The more quaility citations present in a paper, the more likely it will be well received.
Same is true for search, at least in the beginnings of Google. The more quailty links pointing to a site or a page, the higher its ranking. This made it possible for Google to return relevant results. Looking for die casting, the first few links will be to pages about die casting as in metal or the die casting industry, and not gambling. Now more than just quality links are used in the PageRank process, but the fundamental idea is still the same.
What is really interesting and just downright scary, however, is Battelle's idea of the "Perfect Search." His argument is that the interesting stuff has yet to come. He says "in the near future, search will metastasize from its origins on the PC-centric Web and be let loose on all manner of devices" (253). In a sense, this has already happened. If you have a cell phone or PDA-type device that connects to the Internet, you can search for something. Battelle goes further, however, by suggesting that anything and everything will be digitized and searchable.
That's a bit scary. Every piece of information digitized and searchable. Internet Privacy is still in its infancy, but that suggests that social security numbers, personal information, etc. will be on the Web, accessable to anyone. He points this out earlier in the book when he discusses employers and employees "Googling" to learn more about the other. He raises some serious privacy issues as well. Internet stalkers, for example, and how to determine when that line has been crossed.
But the idea of "Perfect Search" is awesome, daunting and almost an invasion of privacy. It has the power to solve numerous complex or simple every-day problems. He uses lost luggage as an example. With "Perfect Search" and every piece of information digitized, there will be a RFID tag in your luggage, and to find it, you just perform a search like you would "Google" a location.
For any of this to happen, however, the "invisble Web" needs to be found by search engines. Battelle describes this, citing Gary Price and Chris Sherman, as being "everything that is available via the Web, but has yet to be found by search engines. Deep databases of knowledge...are walled off from search for commericial or technology reasons" (254). Lexis-Nexis, your hard drive for example, are not indexed by search engines.
Imagine what life will be like when every piece of information can be found in search engines. It's difficult to imagine life without Google, without search. But it certainly holds quite a promising, slippery future.
Rating: G$_G$_G$_G$_G$
So I read The Search first. Not surprising there was information I already knew. The beginnings of the Internet, the first attempt at search, search engine AltaVista and so on. What was fascinating, however, was how Battelle strung everything together. He connected all the dots. The Internet started as an academic means of connecting and sharing information. Search was a way to try and find that information but imperfect and quite frustrating. AltaVista was the best thing going but even it didn't spit out the most relevant information.
It sounds so simple, but the Google Guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, built an alogrythm for their PhD project that would crawl the Web and assign a rank to each page. However, what has become known as PageRank, assigned ranking based on the age-old academic citation process. The more quaility citations present in a paper, the more likely it will be well received.
Same is true for search, at least in the beginnings of Google. The more quailty links pointing to a site or a page, the higher its ranking. This made it possible for Google to return relevant results. Looking for die casting, the first few links will be to pages about die casting as in metal or the die casting industry, and not gambling. Now more than just quality links are used in the PageRank process, but the fundamental idea is still the same.
What is really interesting and just downright scary, however, is Battelle's idea of the "Perfect Search." His argument is that the interesting stuff has yet to come. He says "in the near future, search will metastasize from its origins on the PC-centric Web and be let loose on all manner of devices" (253). In a sense, this has already happened. If you have a cell phone or PDA-type device that connects to the Internet, you can search for something. Battelle goes further, however, by suggesting that anything and everything will be digitized and searchable.
That's a bit scary. Every piece of information digitized and searchable. Internet Privacy is still in its infancy, but that suggests that social security numbers, personal information, etc. will be on the Web, accessable to anyone. He points this out earlier in the book when he discusses employers and employees "Googling" to learn more about the other. He raises some serious privacy issues as well. Internet stalkers, for example, and how to determine when that line has been crossed.
But the idea of "Perfect Search" is awesome, daunting and almost an invasion of privacy. It has the power to solve numerous complex or simple every-day problems. He uses lost luggage as an example. With "Perfect Search" and every piece of information digitized, there will be a RFID tag in your luggage, and to find it, you just perform a search like you would "Google" a location.
For any of this to happen, however, the "invisble Web" needs to be found by search engines. Battelle describes this, citing Gary Price and Chris Sherman, as being "everything that is available via the Web, but has yet to be found by search engines. Deep databases of knowledge...are walled off from search for commericial or technology reasons" (254). Lexis-Nexis, your hard drive for example, are not indexed by search engines.
Imagine what life will be like when every piece of information can be found in search engines. It's difficult to imagine life without Google, without search. But it certainly holds quite a promising, slippery future.
Rating: G$_G$_G$_G$_G$
posted by Gwynne at
6:29 PM
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