Search engine experts have favorably received John Battelle’s book on the search engine industry, The Search. Pandia agrees: This is a highly recommended book.

Innovation is no longer considered a linear process starting in science and ending in marketing.

Modern studies of innovation have revealed complex patterns of learning and networking, where new ideas might appear anywhere in the system: in the marketing department, among customers or in the universities.

Successful innovation is based on the ability to find relevant competences and technologies, understand them and make use of them.

Moreover, it requires a culture that recognizes a good idea when it appears, and a management structure that is able to support innovation processes effectively when they turn up.

The search engine industry is revealing because of its ability to combine hard university science with applied product development, marketing and public relation skills. Google excels at this, but some of the other actors are equally clever in their approaches: Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, MSN.

However, search engine history is filled with failures, and some of them read like text books on how not to run an innovative company. The rise and fall of AltaVista is a good example of this, and that story is excellently described in John Battelle’s new book The Search.

Indeed, on one level this is a book about the history of web search.

John Battelle’s book gives you a glimpse into the world behind the gee wiz headlines. He tells you about the individual entrepreneurs driving innovation in this area, and not only giants like Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google.

One of the most interesting stories in the book is actually the tale about Bill Gross, the man that made pay-per-click text ad advertising the most effective business model in the search engine world. Gross established GoTo, later named Overture, now part of the Yahoo! empire.

Battelle argues that GoTo probably should have stuck to its original model, keeping GoTo a search portal for people looking for goods and services, instead of abandoning the portal and concentrating on delivering text ads to other search portals. After all, this is exactly what Google decided to do a few years later.

Battelle is a great admirer of Google. However, unlike many commentators his admiration does not turn into a religion. He gives a very good analysis of the weaknesses in Google’s strategies.

Google did for instance start out with a rather naïve view of business ethics, summing up its business model with the words “Don’t be Evil!” The war against terror and its adventures in China has made it extremely hard for Google to keep its hands clean.

Hence it may now be forced into helping the American government in surveying the search habits of suspected individuals.

In order to get access to the Chinese market, it has given in to demands of helping the Chinese government into cesoring search results (For Battelle’s take on Google and China, see our article “On Google’s Taiwan blunder”)

Who is John Battelle? Well, he is one of the most respected search engine observers at the moment, making his web log one of the most popular in this field.

He is a co funding editor of Wired and the founder of the Industry Standard.

Because of this he has an extended network of contacts and friends in the industry, giving him access to some of the most important players in this area. Indeed, the book is partly based on interviews Battelle has made with CEOs and entrepreneurs.

Finally, the book may also serve as a beginner’s introduction to search engine technologies, their past and their possible future.

If the book has any weaknesses, it may be that it is very US-centric. European search engine companies, like Norwegian Fast, are for instance given a few paragraphs only.

That being said, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in innovation in the search engine industry.

John Battelle: The Search, How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed our Culture, Portfolio, New York 2005.

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