My everyday work involves search engines, both using them for research and developing the technology. I was deeply impressed by the lengthy and highly enthusiastic reviews posted here. One day, I wandered into a bookstore and saw the book. I bought it without even opening it. I have to say that given the high expectation, I was quite disappointed by the book.
I read the book in detail for most parts of it and skimmed through the rest of it. The book I like most is that it is not just about Google, blog search, myspace, etc. It attempted to give a broad analysis of the topic, mostly from non-technical viewpoints, drawing literatures from very diversified sources, AI, social science, politics, history, etc. I learned terms like folksonomies, boundary objects and a lot of stories and quotes that I can use to make my next presentation on the same subject more interesting. This is what I gained from the book.
The main weakness of the book is twofold. First, the book does not help you understand more about the problem of findability and where the future might be, let alone giving you a hint on the solution; it repeats what most people have already known and re-asserted it with more discussions and examples. Second, the writing adopted a style commonly found in online articles and blogs. Beautiful but confusing statements. The style is good for online writing where creating controversies and arguments is an important goal of writing, but I won't expect it from a book. For example, on Page 38, the author said "... visualization approaches fail because there's no there there." It is not only hard to understand, but once you do you find it not true. The purpose of information visualization is not to represent pages in 3D space with edges representing the distances between pages (see what the author quoted in the same paragraph) but one of the important goals, and obstacles, is to extract the themes of the pages and connect the themes based on their semantic relationships. A careful look at Fig 2-14, a screendump from Grokker, would reveal that what were shown on the screen were topics, not pages. On Page 143, when talking about a client's website become unsearchable because texts on the pages were rendered as images, the author said "one the web, the journey often begins with the destination." Beautiful, but the truthfulness of the statement depends on which end of the pipe you are looking into. There are too many examples like these that don't stand deep logical reasoning. A full elaboration will make this review too long.
After reading the book, I felt like I have read a long blog from the author. Like reading any blog written by great minds, you often find shining ideas here and there, but you have to endure the style of writing and imprecisions, and organize the thoughts yourself. This is what the author advocated anyway (Chapter 7 Inspired Decisions).
