Culture vultures

By Russell Brown, November 17, 2006 @ 2 am

The lengthy title is important here: this is not so much a book about Google as one that uses the Google story as an anchor for a brilliant illumination of the way that culture and commerce have changed in the 21st century.

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

By John Battelle

Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2006. $32.99 (paperback)

Battelle begins his story in 2001, shortly after he had himself chewed up and spat out by the first Internet boom. He chanced upon the first edition of Google Zeitgeist, a weekly report on which search terms are hot and not. My God, he thought, Google knows what our culture wants! This intuition, this glimpse into the power of search, drives the book.

If Battelle’s intuitions about search aren’t unique, his ability to convey them through a lively and surprising narrative about the origin and direction of the Internet’s biggest brands may well be. He has the key interviews; not least those with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

He tarries briefly at the points where the founders’ big idea could have come undone, or been subsumed by an early acquisition. And he nails the key moment when, with the conventional Internet advertising market tanking, the founders reached for a model developed by the now-forgotten GoTo.com. That model became AdWords, the business that monetised Google’s undeniable technical leadership.

For business readers, the book peaks in the middle, with a chapter called ‘The Search Economy’ where Battelle lays out the promise of ‘intention-based marketing’, where search becomes the essence of media strategy. Not by chance, the following chapter, ‘Search, Privacy, Government and Evil’, examines the perils of that dream. Battelle’s story ends before Google’s controversial decision this year to censor its search results as the price of entry to China, but he anticipates it perfectly.

This is a great book and a passionate one. As another reviewer said: all searchers should read it.

On the make

The world needs more magazines, and here’s another from the country with more mags than sheep (well, almost). Makeshift is the semi-commercial effort of recent AUT University grads disappointed by the gulf between the art community and the rest of us. “We want to take art away from the rigid architecture of a gallery opening with its wine and cheese, hmms and aahs,” says co-founder Rachel Brody. “Makeshift is the device to bring together artists and audience.” Edition one is on newsstands in Auckland only, but the team plans for a quarterly release nationwide along with a website and events programme.