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.

From the ground-breaking offices of Google, 'Search Inside Yourself' is a personal growth program that focuses on developing emotional intelligence through mindfulness, making its participants more productive at work and better leaders, while becoming more peaceful, happy and compassionate individuals. Famed for its innovative and unusual, yet highly successful working culture, Google is more than just a search engine. One such innovation is the' Search Inside Yourself' program, created for Google by a diverse group of individuals including a Zen Master, a CEO, a Stanford University scientist, and author Daniel Goleman, it's been a life changing program for many participants, contributing to great improvements in both their personal and professional lives. 'Search Inside Yourself' has been taught in Google since 2007 producing dramatic results. Some participants have found new meaning and fulfilment in their jobs (one person changed her mind about leaving the company after taking the course!) Some have become much better at what they do; one engineering manager discovered the importance of giving himself quality time and reduced his working hours to four days a week. After he did that, he got promoted! Some have become more effective managers, learning to listen and communicate better and bringing a calm attitude to every situation. Not surprisingly, many people found 'Search Inside Yourself' to be beneficial in their personal lives as well. Many participants found they were happier and less-stressed, their marital relationships improved and some even said the program helped them deal with personal crises. This book will show you how to apply the principles of 'Search Inside Yourself' to you, your business and everyday life. Whether you are a junior team member or a senior manager, a secondary school teacher or a bus driver these valuable lessons have the potential to dramatically improve your life. Written by Chade-Meng Tan, the first engineer in Google's history to leave the Engineering department and join their Peoples Ops Group, where he leads this and other personal-growth programs. It also includes a foreword by Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence and introduction from Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of Wherever You Go, There You Are.

The approach to and understanding of software engineering at Google is unlike any other company. With this book, you’ll get a candid and insightful look at how software is constructed and maintained by some of the world’s leading practitioners.
Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, and Hyrum K. Wright, software engineers and a technical writer at Google, reframe how software engineering is practiced and taught: from an emphasis on programming to an emphasis on software engineering, which roughly translates to programming over time.
You’ll learn:
Fundamental differences between software engineering and programming
How an organization effectively manages a living codebase and efficiently responds to inevitable change
Why culture (and recognizing it) is important, and how processes, practices, and tools come into play