John Battelle's book The Search introduces the readers to a number of interesting persons Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Google and Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo! To mention just a few. But one of my favorites was Bill Gross.
During his time as head of a children's software learning company Gross worked with Stephen Spielberg. “Inspired by Spielberg, Gross decided his dream job was to start a company that allowed him to start many companies in parallel – a business incubator of sorts an idea factory.” This observation was quite helpful for me ad my own sense of vocation. For what is a college or seminary if not an idea factory.” (p 99)
The assumptions in the Society of Biblical Literature post on the wikipedia did not attend to one of the core assumptions of the Internet, namely that in the beginning for folk on the Web research begins on the Web. “When folks went looking for something, they usually started at a search engine.” (p 155) Now what happens in biblical studies if the Web precedes the library as the first research step. What happens when persons choose institutions of higher education through a process that begins with a search engine?
Google's VP Tim Armstrong describing the notion of AdWords says “search turns a cost center into a profit center.” (p 171) The challenge for small schools is to figure out how vehicles such as Google AdWords can prove to be a leveraged resource for marketing.
Google employee number one, Craig Silverstein “I would like to see a search engines become like the computers in Star Trek, yous talk to them and they understand what you're asking.” (p15) We aspire information search that we ask for in our own vernacular. If computers start to understand our queries will it matter that persons do not understand one another's queries?
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