What does the world want? According to John Battelle, a company that answers that question -- in all its shades of meaning -- can unlock the most intractable riddles of both business and culture. And for the past few years, that's exactly what Google has been doing. Jumping into the game long after Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, and other pioneers, Google offered a radical new approach to search, redefined the idea of viral marketing, survived the dotcom crash, and pulled off the largest and most talked about initial public offering in the history of Silicon Valley. But The Search offers much more than the inside story of Google's triumph. It's also a big-picture book about the past, present, and future of search technology, and the enormous impact it is starting to have on marketing, media, pop culture, dating, job hunting, international law, civil liberties, and just about every other sphere of human interest. More than any of its rivals, Google has become the gateway to instant knowledge. Hundreds of millions of people use it to satisfy their wants, needs, fears, and obsessions, creating an enormous artifact that Battelle calls "the Database of Intentions." Somewhere in Google's archives, for instance, you can find the agonized research of a gay man with AIDS, the silent plotting of a would-be bombmaker, and the anxiety of a woman checking out her blind date. Combined with the databases of thousands of other search-driven businesses, large and small, it all adds up to a goldmine of information that powerful organizations (including the government) will want to get their hands on. No one is better qualified to explain this entire phenomenon than Battelle, who cofounded Wired and founded The Industry Standard. Perhaps more than any other journalist, he has devoted his career to finding the holy grail of technology -- something as transformational as the Macintosh was in the mid- 1980s. And he has finally found it in search. Battelle draws on more than 350 interviews with major players from Silicon Valley to Seattle to Wall Street, including Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and CEO Eric Schmidt, as well as competitors like Louis Monier, who invented AltaVista, and Neil Moncrief, a soft-spoken Georgian whose business Google built, destroyed, and built again. Battelle lucidly reveals how search technology actually works, explores the amazing power of targeted advertising, and reports on the frenzy of the Google IPO, when the company tried to rewrite the rules of Wall Street and declared "don't be evil" as its corporate motto. For anyone who wants to understand how Google really succeeded -- and the implications of a world in which every click can be preserved forever -- THE SEARCH is an eye-opening and indispensable read.

这个世界需要什么？如何任何一家公司能回答好这个问题，它就掌握了控制商业社会，乃至整个人类文明的万能钥匙。在过去的几年中，Google正在为获得这把钥匙而努力。虽然Google并非搜索业务的最早开发者，但它凭借着简明、便利、实用的搜索技术和理念，逐渐击败雅虎、Alta Vista等搜索领域的先锋，成为搜索行业名副其实的王者。 本书描述了Google如何从斯坦福一个不起眼的公司迅速崛起为“用思想控制世界的搜索巨头”，再现了Google首次公开上市时写华乐街的游戏规则，公开宣布其“不作恶”的信条时掀起的狂潮，以及搜索技术的兴起对市场营销、传媒产业、流行文化、职业发展、公民权利等人类社会各方面的巨大影响。 作者约翰·巴利特是《产业标准》杂志的创始人，也是著名的行业杂志《连线》创始人之一。为写作本书，巴特利采访了从硅谷到华尔街与搜索行业相关的350多人，包括Google的两位创始人拉里·佩奇、谢尔盖·布林和公司总裁埃里克·施米特等风云人物。他指出，搜索的革命性意义并非表现在搜索巨头间的激战上，重要的是，Google和其他的搜索引擎已经在不知不觉中深深地改变了我们的做事习惯和生活方式，成为通向整个世界的需求、兴趣、恐惧和欲望的窗口，旨趣的数据库，它们也注定会成为21世纪资本的枢纽。 这或许是我们的幸运，或者也是一种悲哀。但无论如何，你都可以从这本书中找到世界可能的未来。