Lots of travel recently. As a result, not much posting. But I’ve managed to read a couple of books on airplanes recently, one of which I’ll write about today. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Battelle got a fair bit of ink when it came out in the fall. But even nine months after its launch, I still found it to be a smart, interesting book that’s definitely worth reading if you’re involved in any aspect of the Internet or media business. Here are a few random insights, observations, and factoids that I found compelling:
1. Search engines represent a database of human intention. “Intent drives search–the holy grail of all search engines is to decide your true intent–what you are looking for and in what context.” The genius of Google and its ilk is that they have “shifted the marketing model from one based on content attachment to one based on intent attachment.”
2. Alas, Google didn’t discover this revolutionary new approach. It was a classic “second mouse.” (You know. . . the early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.) Bill Gross, who founded a short-lived service called Overture, was “the first to see a world where millions upon millions of search queries created the perfect advertising marketplace.” Larry and Sergey were fast followers, not pioneers. “Bill Gross can quite legitimately claim to have created the business model that made Google possible, and in the process reinventing pretty much the entire economic cardiopulmonary system of the Internet.”
3. Search is the fastest-growing business in the history of media. And Deloitte Touche says Google is the fastest-growing company . . . ever. How important does Battelle think Google is? “Google is more than just another company. As far as the Internet ecosystem is concerned, Google is the weather.”
4. And we haven’t seen anything yet. According to Battelle, Google has monumental ambitions: “the company would like to provide a platform that mediates supply and demand for pretty much the entire economy.” Or as he also puts it, “Google is angling to become the de facto marketplace for all of global commerce.” Not bad for a bunch of second mice.