John Battelle's Searchblog

In the past two weeks nearly every press outlet on the planet has called me asking for thoughts on where Google is going and how Google got to where it is. The reason? Google turns 10 years old, according to most estimates, this weekend.

I've talked to as many folks as I can (after all I was a journalist covering technology for quite some time) but I did have to turn down a few given how busy life gets after the summer holidays. In any case, I'll post links to all the Ten Year stories I find here, starting with the Daily Telegraph in London:

Ten years of Google - Telegraph

Spin Around Google's Decade - BBC

Google Looks to the Next 10 Years - Also BBC

Google reigns as world’s most powerful 10-year-old - Boston Herald/AP

Happy Birthday, Google - Marketplace Radio

Wither Google As It Turns Ten? - CBS Early Show

Google Ten Years From Now - Guardian

An Anthropology of Google's Search Experiments (with all data exposed, of course).

Never will happen, but we get some tantalizing hints in this post on the Google blog:

At any given time, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments on Google sites all over the world. I'll start by describing experimental changes so small that you can barely tell the difference after staring at the page, and end with a couple of much more visually obvious experiments that we have run. There are a lot of people dedicated to detecting everything Google changes - and occasionally, things imagined that we did not do! - and they do latch on to a lot of our more prominent experiments. But the experiments with smaller changes are almost never noticed.

I was wondering what data was sent to Google from Chrome users. Matt has the answers, and so far, seems innocuous.

Brady reprises the Google Alphabet (the first word auto-populated by the newly integrated Google Suggest for each letter in the alphabet).

Friday linkday:

Via Churbuck, a nice walkthrough of how to use Google search tools to understand site acquisition and traffic patterns.

As long as we're in a learning mode, here's a post on using FriendFeed as a business tool.

The IE8 beta is out. I need to grok this. It's got some stuff in it that effects the advertising ecosystem in serious ways that I have yet to grok, and am not seeing much coverage of. More at Forbes and Ed Bott.

Mashable reports on a bucket of money for JumpTap, a competitor in the mobile search arena, an area I am increasingly finding interesting.

Like reggae? Me too. Given it's Friday, check out Steel Pulse via BBtv.

Perks defined Google for years, and defined most Silicon Valley culture as well. Microsoft has been famous for its perks since the early 90s, in fact. So when a number of posts, sparked by a NYT article (now nearly two months old) claim that the era of perks is over at Google, it prompts musings such as this one in ComputerWorld, claiming Google has lost its mojo.

I'm not sure that's true, at least not yet. Perhaps amongst IT managers, that's true (ComputerWorld being an IT publication, after all), but I am not sure IT managers ever had more than a passing interest in Google's "mojo" to begin with.

The piece is entirely anecdotal, so the conclusion must be as well. For now, the jury is out.

(photo Jeff Kravitz)
I have to ask. After seeing them live, I have to wonder. They did rip my head off, as did Metallica at Bonnaroo. They have this way of being both ridiculously tight, as well as totally psychedelic. Not easy to pull off. What do you all think? Are you Radiohead fans? Why?

Google launches Ad Manager to the public and Google Suggest. Meanwhile, Street View keeps pushing the big question in our society: Where do we end and the public begins?

Here's the streaming output of CrowdFire:

You can grab your own here.

AFP coverage here.

I am a fan of PhotoSynth. I hope Microsoft gets some traction with this. Brady's take here. My earlier coverage.

Lisa Gold (via Cory and BB) has a blog about book research. I love this post about an oft repeated Samuel Johnson quote.

The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.” — Samuel Johnson

I thought this famous Samuel Johnson quote would be an appropriate way to begin my blog. The problem is that Johnson never actually said this.....The actual Johnson quote is: “Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.” I confirmed this by searching the text of Boswell’s Life of Johnson online.

A Forbes piece on Google's latest investment in alternative energy. We'll have Larry Brilliant, head of Google.org, at Web 2 this year...

... on Tuesday, Google.org, the philanthropic arm of search giant Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), announced it would try to help spur companies to reach underground to produce clean electricity. It is investing a total of $10 million in a geothermal energy company called AltaRock Energy and a drilling company called Potter Drilling, and it is funding research and mapping efforts and a policy agenda.

It is part of Google.org's effort to help bring about renewable energy that is cheaper than coal by investing in companies, research and policy development. The organization is focusing on three main technologies: solar thermal power, which uses the sun's heat to generate electricity; advanced wind technology; and, now, a way of tapping geothermal energy called enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS.

Tim brings up a very good point here. In short, he's worried about the second click issue, write large (yep, I just linked to myself).

I'd like to put out two guidelines for anyone adopting this "link to myself" strategy:

1. Ensure that no more than 50% of the links on any page are to yourself. (Even this number may be too high.)

2. Ensure that the pages you create at those destinations are truly more valuable to your readers than any other external link you might provide.

The web is a great example of a system that works because most sites create more value than they capture. Maybe the tragedy of the commons in its future can be averted. Maybe not. It's up to each of us.

Working on CrowdFire (sorry, I know, but it's a big deal to me), as well as Web 2 and tons of other FM stuff, and trying to not ruin my family's time on Island. So I'm going to be dark on the blog for the most part...

Andrew Chen (via Tim) has some really fun charts on "Web 2" apps here. Below, the graph for Twitter, one of the most interesting ones. Shows how strong it is in "early adopter" states but basically "dead" elsewhere.

Update: Turns out, this data is not exactly accurate - for more, see TC here.

Check it out here. And don't forget to feed the Crowdfire here. You can see shots from my Blackberry of the Wailers last night here!

Because Google Maps is not very good. At the real world. And while Google is trying to fix that by allowing map editing, I don't sense Google will be very good at fostering and nurturing the kind of communities that will allow Maps to self correct.

Put another way, because Google is not very good at communities that self-correct into reasonable quality, and if it's going to realize the vision it might (of turning the entire world into, well usable data) it's going to have to get a lot better, a lot faster.

(I know, you thought I was going to say because Knol ain't so great, or because Wikipedia is still one of biggest recipients of Google's second click....that's also true)....

Allow me to explain. In the next post. I promise...

Way back when, Larry Page thought it would be a cool idea to know what sites were linking back to any particular page you might be on while browsing the Internet.

In order to scratch that itch, he had to build a graph of the web. That graph became BackRub. But the product never became anything. Instead, he and Sergey realized that the index they had created was an excellent search engine.

That engine became Google.

But....I still want BackRub.

Really, wouldn't it be cool to know who was linking to any particular page you were on? Why isn't anyone making this available as widget? Anyone know of anybody doing it?

Those of you following my posts around the theme of this year's Web 2 Summit already know that we're expanding the scope of the conference this year, and asking a core question: How can we apply the lessons of the Web to the world at large? From my post outlining the theme:

As we convene the fifth annual Web 2.0 Summit, our world is fraught with problems that engineers might charitably classify as NP hard—from roiling financial markets to global warming, failing healthcare systems to intractable religious wars. In short, it seems as if many of our most complex systems are reaching their limits.

It strikes us that the Web might teach us new ways to address these limits. From harnessing collective intelligence to a bias toward open systems, the Web's greatest inventions are, at their core, social movements. To that end, we're expanding our program this year to include leaders in the fields of healthcare, genetics, finance, global business, and yes, even politics.

Increasingly, the leaders of the Internet economy are turning their attention to the world outside our industry. And conversely, the best minds of our generation are turning to the Web for solutions. At the fifth annual Web 2.0 Summit, we'll endeavor to bring these groups together.

To my mind, no person better exemplifies the merging of these two worlds than former Vice President (and Nobel laureate) Al Gore, the Chairman of Current TV. Gore and CEO Joel Hyatt started Current as "a new breed of media company that works with its young adult audience to create media that informs, enriches and inspires," by integrating online and offline media, a very Web Meets World endeavor indeed. Readers may recall that Gore recently joined Kleiner Perkins as a partner focused on green issues, as well. And we are very pleased to announce that VP Gore will be joining us at the Web 2 Summit this year.

Others joining VP Gore include Elon Musk, of PayPal, Tesla, SolarCity and SpaceX, Larry Brilliant, the head of the Google.org foundation, and Michael Pollan, author of many wonderful books on our relationship to food, including my favorite: The Botany of Desire. The full lineup is truly wonderful, and we're still adding speakers.

Requests for invitations can be found here, this is going to be one special event.

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