Book Note: The Search
Posted on Wednesday, November 9, 2005
at 2:15 PM (permalink)
I finished this book a month ago, but I was so impressed that I decided to go back and see if I could collect the key insights from each chapter to create an abbreviated guide. Hopefully this will encourage you to buy and read the whole thing.
Chapter 1. The Database of Intentions
By the fall of 2001, the Internet industry was in full retreat. Hundreds of once promising start-ups--mine among them--lay smoldering in bankruptcy. (p. 1)
[Google] Zeitgeist had more than its finger on the pulse of our culture, it was directly jacked into the culture's nervous system. This was my first glimpse into what I came to call the Database of Intentions--a living artifact of immense power. (p. 2)
Google was a technology business, he [Eric Schmidt] told me. (p. 3)
A year later I met with Eric again. Among his first words: "Isn't the media business great?" (p. 4)
Much as the Windows interface defined our interactions with the personal computer, search defines our interactions with the Internet. (p. 4)
The Database of Intentions is simply this: the aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. (p. 6)
This structure will provide the seedbed for scores of new cultural phenomena over the next decade. (p. 7)
Companies like Overture and Google made their first profits in the darkest hours of the dot-com collapse. (p. 8)
In essence we have taken much of our once-ephemeral and quotidian lives--our daily habits of whom we talk to, what we look for, what we buy--and made those actions eternal. (p. 10)
Search drives clickstreams, and clickstreams drive profits. To profit in the Internet space, corporations need access to clickstreams. And this, more than any other reason, is why clickstreams are becoming eternal. (p. 12)
If Google and companies like it know what the world wants, powerful organizations become quite interested in them, and vulnerable individuals see them as a threat. (p. 13)
As a Google executive noted to me when I brought this up: "We're one bad story away from being seen as Big Brother." (p. 14)
But imagine the disorientation you might feel if search becomes self-aware--capable of watching you as you interact with it. (p. 15)
My problem is not finding something," says Danny Hillis, a MacArthur Foundation genius and computer scientist who now runs a consulting company. "My problem is understanding something." (p. 16)
