The Hindu Business Line : Business in the search economy

The search business is already a multi-billion-dollar industry because "in the global information space, search has become our spade, the point of our inquiry and discovery," says this book.

HARRIET Miers, Jessica Biel, Michelle Wie and Ramadan are the first four in the rankings on www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.htm listing `Top 15 Gaining Queries: Week Ending October 10, 2005'. Zeitgeist is German for `the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era,' as the URL explains; but John Battelle avers that Google has more than its finger on the pulse of our culture. It is directly jacked into the culture's nervous system, he writes in The Search, from Nicholas Brealey (www.nbrealey-books.com) .

"Link by link, click by click, search is building possibly the most lasting, ponderous, and significant cultural artifact in the history of humankind: the Database of Intentions," writes Battelle. This database is "the aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result," he explains.

But how is the collection going to be useful? "Taken together, this information represents a real-time history of post-Web culture - a massive clickstream database of desires, needs, wants, and preferences that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited for all sorts of ends," outlines the author.

Search is one of the most challenging and interesting problems in all of computer science, informs Battelle, to emphasise the importance of search in artificial intelligence. Haven't solutions for search been searched for and found? Not fully; "search as a problem is about five per cent solved," is a quote of Udi Manber, the CEO of Amazon's A9.com search engine, cited in the book.

Even at 5 per cent, the search business is already a multi-billion-dollar industry, notes the author, because "in the global information space, search has become our spade, the point of our inquiry and discovery".

A search engine consists of three major pieces, viz. the crawl, the index, and the runtime system or query processor, explains Battelle. The search starts with the user who is intent on finding an answer. Crawlers, `the least visible of the search engine's components' are not "tiny little robots wandering the vast halls of cyberspace". They sit on their own servers and send out vast number of requests to pages on the Net, as much as your browser does, says the author.

Nearly 40 per cent of us have done a `vanity search', found a 2004 Harris poll, writes Battelle. It means we typed our own name to see "if we exist in the doppelganger of the search index". The number can head north of 90 per cent, foresees the author. "Besides ourselves, nearly 20 per cent of us have looked for former flames and 36 per cent for old friends, and 29 per cent have researched a family matter."

A chapter looks at `search before Google', a phrase that may sound like prehistoric times for the Google-hooked! "The honour of being the first Internet search engine goes to Archie, a pre-Web search application created in 1990 by a McGill University student named Alan Emtage," informs the book. It was called Archie because it scoured the archives. About Yahoo, you'd read about what is not the `official story' - that "Yahoo got its start when two bored PhD candidates at Stanford hacked together a system that helped them win a fantasy basketball league".

While discussing `the Search Economy', Battelle points out that `click fraud' threatens to undermine the entire premise of Google's and Yahoo's success. Click fraud is "the act of purposely clicking ad listings without intending to buy from the advertiser," defines www.tractionsearch.com. "Click fraud is the decidedly black-hat practice of gaming not organic results (as in the case of eBay affiliates), but paid search ads, the very heart of the search economy," warns the author.

A book worth searching for!

There hangs the tale

IT took the Apollo astronauts only three days to reach the moon, a distance almost a hundred times as great as the width of the Atlantic, and news from the moon could reach us in seconds," but only centuries ago the US was two months away from Europe, writes John Steele Gordon in "A Thread Across the Ocean," from HarperCollins (www.harpercollins.com) . "News could travel no faster than human beings could carry it," across the three thousand miles of ocean. "There was not even a regular postal system; letters were entrusted to anyone willing to carry them, to be delivered when and if possible."

Baby steps in submarine cables began in 1845 when John and Jacob Brett laid a telegraph line between England and France. "The cable was so light that it wouldn't sink, and thirty-pound lead weights had to be added every so often," reads the story of the adventure. The Brett brothers reached France by nightfall and sent a message back to England. Though it was received as gibberish, "they had proved it was possible to transmit electricity across a submarine cable of that length," writes Gordon. "The next morning, however, the line was completely dead," he adds. Why? How? A fisherman's anchor had hauled it up; he thought the copper core might be gold, so he cut out a piece to show others!

The next year, a vastly improved cable was laid and it worked. "England was connected for the first time since the last Ice Age to the continent of Europe, so news in Paris could be news in London at the same time. Soon submarine cables connected England to Holland and Ireland and, in 1854, one was laid from Italy to Sardinia and Corsica."

That year was significant because Cyrus Field, an American businessman, decided to lay a cable across the Atlantic to "end at a stroke his country's remoteness from the rest of the world". Ambitious, it seemed, because the limits achieved then in cabling were 110 miles in length and 300 fathoms in depth. "An Atlantic cable would have to be more than 2,000 miles long and reach depths of 2,600 fathoms." Yet, Field could achieve the feat in about 12 years, and five attempts.

Cable was ordered from Britain - not so much because of Britain's technological and industrial lead over the rest of the world as its monopoly on a now nearly forgotten material, gutta-percha, informs Gordon. "It comes from several trees native to Malaya... It is chemically similar to rubber, and both are natural plastics, polymers in chemical terms. But gutta-percha is only moderately flexible, not elastic like rubber. Also unlike rubber, it does not deteriorate when immersed in water for long periods," is a crash course on materials.

It was Werner von Siemens who determined that gutta-percha was a good electrical insulator; Michael Faraday wrote a short paper on the material's electrical qualities in 1848. And there were also gutta-percha golf balls that could be driven about 25 yards farther than the old `featheries' made of "leather stuffed with boiled goose feathers".

The book shows a sketch of the 1857 cable in actual size, `as big as a man's index finger'. "In air it weighed one ton per mile, while its weight in water was only 1,3490 pounds per mile. It was calculated that it was strong enough to bear a weight of 6,500 pounds before breaking, equivalent to nearly five miles of its weight in water," are technical details that should interest the techies.

Since the depth in the proposed route was a maximum of two and a half miles, there was adequate safety margin, thought the entrepreneurs. But there were other problems: "There was not a ship in the world capable of carrying 2,500 miles of submarine cable weighing 2,500 tons. Therefore there was no choice but to employ two ships and splice the cable together at some point... "

Great story!

Books courtesy: Landmark (www.landmarkonthenet.com)

Books2Byte@TheHindu.co.in

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page

Stories in this Section
A tough nut to crack

Exciting edge to match

A sharp eye out

Getting the message

Scoring with accuracy

Slow system that hangs often

`Browser Wars are on'

Handle with care

Quiz

Business in the search economy