Published in 2005, so a bit dated at this point, The Search is still very relevant to those interested in what Google is up to and what libraries/librarians should be aware of. Bartelle explores web searching and explains why he thinks "search" will come to rule our economy and maybe even our culture in the near future. His book is packed with information on searching, on Google, on Google's founders, and more, but the key points I focused on were the following:
- how search works/ed in various search engines in 2005,
- who is searching the internet and how (most searchers enter just 1-2 words and do not used advanced search features available to them),
- what they are searching for (according to Bartelle, Google says over 50% of the searches entered daily into its engine are unique! (28) and many searches could be considered "commercial"),
- how money is made via targeted advertising (ads that appear correlate to one's searches and/or clickstream and companies pay Google for keywords),
- why search results will be better as more and more information is digitized and entered into Google's system (ubiquity) and more clickstreams are analyzed
- how web search history (your clickstream) will result in a personalized result set for you and bring up confounding issues of privacy
- how tagging will result in a search more tolerant of semantics (the semantic web)
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