Life in Balance: Amit D. Chaudhary’s Blog
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Score: 3/5
Amazon link for The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Battelle
Summary: What it cover is what the title says. Search, it’s pre-google origin, some focus on google, future possible directions including searching devices, meta tags, etc and some of the challenges for google including link spam, click fraud, etc.

It was interesting enough to hold my attention and I finished it.

Key takeway points:
-Advertising became relevant, targeted and trackable with AdWords and AdSense, originally started by Overture (GoTo.com). Compared this with television ads and so on.
-Approach of Google (Algorithms) v/s Yahoo(Humans to get to end result)
-On the Google struggle of do no evil.
-Had good coverage on the US Patriot act and it’s implications, but was probably late to cover the recent case.
-Had good background on pre-Google day, probably Altavista, Overture and so on. Probably due to the author covering it as part of Wired Magazine editor.
-Future of search: Good chapter broken up into areas.

It did not go in depth is most of the topics, for example,
-Did not go in depth in the challenges faced by google, covering what an general article would describe.
-Culture and working of Google including inner workings. Just touched on 20% personal project item, did not touch on perks, talent, etc. Probably did not interview enough employees, if at all.
-On history of google, had some decent coverage including the standford days, but more information can be obtained in articles, blogs like xooglers or in seminars by Google execs or directors like Ram Sriram.
-Did not cover what is the impact of going up in Google Pagerank, impact of small business using Adwords.

I would not recommend it to a techie peer, maybe borrow one from library and read the first chapter and last chapter for search thoughts. There are some good chapters on pre-google search companies, most of google material is not new.

The author is an astute observer and knows his field well and it shows. However, it does not have enough background work to go into details one would expect from a book versus articles or blog entries.

Maybe someday later I will checkout the following.
The Google Story by David Vise, Mark Malseed