Battelle - The search: how google and its rivals rewrote the rules of business andtransformed our culture

B y the fall of 2001, the Internet industry was in full retreat. Hundreds of once promising start-upsmine among themlay smoldering in bankruptcy. The dreams of Internet riches, of changing the world of business and reshaping our culture in the process, dreams celebrated in magazine cover stories and television specials and unheard-of stock market valuations, well, those dreams were stone-cold dead.

Still smarting from the loss of my own Internet business1 and wondering whether the Internet story could ever pick itself up off the ground, I stumbled across a link to the first edition of Google Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist is a clever public relations tool that summarizes search terms that are gaining or losing momentum during a particular period of time. By watching and counting popular search terms, Zeitgeist provides a fascinating summary of what our culture is looking for or finds interesting, and, conversely, what was once popular that is losing cultural momentum.

Since 2001, Google has maintained a weekly Zeitgeist on its press relations site, but the link I found was the companys first-ever version of the tool, and it summarized the entire year.2 And what a year 2001 was! Listed among the top gaining queries were Nostradamus (number one), CNN (number two), World Trade Center (number three), and anthrax (number five). The only term to break into the top five that was not related to the terrorist attacks? A collective fantasy about magic and children, Harry Potter , at number four.

The fastest-declining queries demonstrated how quickly our culture was abandoning frivolity: Pokemon was number one, followed closely by Napster, Big Brother (a reality television show), X-Men, and the woman who won Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire.

I was transfixed. Zeitgeist revealed to me that Google had more than its finger on the pulse of our culture, it was directly jacked into the cultures nervous system. This was my first glimpse into what I came to call the Database of Intentionsa living artifact of immense power. My God, I thought, Google knows what our culture wants! Given the millions upon millions of queries streaming into its servers each hour, it seemed to me that the company was sitting on a gold mine of information. Entire publishing businesses could be created from the traces of intent evident in such a database; in fact, Google had already started its first: a beta project called Google News . Could it not also start a research and marketing company capable of telling clients exactly what people were buying, looking to buy, or avoiding? How about starting an e-commerce firm that already knew what the buyer wanted? How about a travel business that knew where the customer wanted to go? The possibilities, it seemed, were endless.

Not to mention that within Googles rich database lay potential fieldwork for thousands of doctorates in cultural anthropology, psychology, history, and sociology. This little company, I thought to myself, rapt and a bit naively, is holding the world by the thoughts. Ive got to go see it. Maybe the dot-com dream wasnt dead; perhaps it had simply been hiding behind the implacable facade of a Google search box.

I remembered that back in April 2001, Eric Schmidt, a founder of Sun Microsystems, had left his job running Novell, the perpetually struggling networking giant, and accepted the chairman and CEO role over at Google (the industry was baffled by the move, but well get to that story later). I knew Eric somewhat, as I covered Novell and Sun while I was a trade reporter, and ran into him at various conferences during my career as an editor and publisher. I decided to take a chance and shoot him an e-mail. I really had no idea what I wanted to talk about, other than my nascent sense that he was onto something big.3 Google, it seemed, was thriving. I had heard that it was pretty much the only place left in the Valley that was hiring engineers. Eric agreed to a meeting, and in early 2002, we sat down for the first of several intriguing talks.

Eric Looks for the Billion-Dollar Opportunity

When we met, I hadnt yet figured out I wanted to write this book, but I was headed that way. I introduced my concept of the Database of Intentions and spoke of how Zeitgeist scratched the surface of what seemed to be a massive new wealth of cultural understanding. As we spoke, I outlined how Google might create a media division to tap into that resource. Yahoo had already declared itself a media company, so why not Google? While Eric agreed that the data collected by Google was impressive, he didnt see the point of starting a media business. Google was a technology business, he told me. Media is best left to people like you, he added.