"The Search" by John Battelle

This book was intensely interesting. What stood out to me immediately was that my fears about being confused with technical jargon were really irrational. The author’s ability to make sense of the complex ideas that created the search engine was amazing. If only that could happen with mathematics or other intimidating subjects. The way the author explained and laid out relevant terms was extremely helpful and I certainly appreciated the effort.

While this book was not supposed to be a corporate history of search, at times I felt it certainly was leaning in that direction. The latter half of the book is nearly overwhelmed with information on and the history of Google. This is not to say that the subject is boring, but sometimes it detracts from his overall purpose for the book. If he openly wrote it as a corporate history, I would have been fine with that. Some of my favorite subjects that he covered did indeed involve Google as well as ethics of search. I thought the author was spot on when he directly said that Google had no direct duty to stand up to the Chinese government or try to influence policy in a different country. But if they had chosen that battle to take a stand for intellectual freedom, what could have happened? It is hard to say, but Google would have gotten such great press in American media as well as represented American business in a positive light. Instead, people who read this book, including myself, probably remember feeling at least uncomfortable if not outright ashamed that an American company whose motto prohibits evil compromised in a business deal with an evil government. I felt that Google’s public answer about why it censored its results was just one obvious lie after another. They did not feel they could afford to tell a government how to run its country, especially considering they were new in the economy? I wonder why they took the exact opposite path concerning the NYSE, where they were arrogant jerks in their statements to future stock holders. Such an alibi in the Chinese case could only be considered reasonable if Google had a past history of being considerate.

One of my favorite parts of the book,concerned all the problems that people have had with contacting Google and how Google has effected people’s businesses. That section changed my assumptions about the company so much. In a 60 Minutes interview with the Google founders from at least a year ago, there was little to dish about the darker side of Google, and I really appreciated that the author showed how even Google is struggling to make decisions concerning business ethics. This part of the book made me think a lot about business ethics. It seems to me that in America there used to be a sense of customer service that was inherent in almost any business, where the motto was that the customer was always right. But I think that the arrogance of the founders of Google as well as the corporate silence about its practices represents a new kind of corporate ethics that does not include the customer really in any way. And while this kind of aversion to serving customers could be chalked up to Google being mainly run by engineers, they must have a customer relations department or at least corporate relations where someone has the duty to answer questions, but has failed to do so.

This made me think more broadly about libraries and what makes them perennially favored in surveys. If there is one thing that librarians have to be good at in order to draw the public, it is customer service. That is one area of librarianship that I am really looking forward to, because at my job now I am learning the basic intricacies of library technology, but I have little interaction with the public. Perhaps Google would do well to hire veteran librarians to help them with their customer service image. While some librarians might balk at such a job description, I think there are few things more rewarding or important to the maintenance of an institution than good customer service values. Google will have people using their search no matter how badly they treat their advertisers or individual cases, but libraries have to depend significantly on word-of-mouth recommendations within a community to stay vital. So perhaps a better analogy that relates to the book is that librarians are really the crawlers in the search engine machine, and their positive energy grows outward in the same manner as those crawlers.