At least to me, a scholarly treatise of one of the most exciting and researched topics in the field of computing is promised by this book’s title and outline. More importantly, the title suggests that the topic is discussed from a broader perspective. The “culture of search” could encompass various themes, and indeed this book attempts to name and elaborate a great number of them. Search, as a service offered by Google, is the result of a primarily technological innovation based on an algorithmic invention. PageRank, as this invention is known, has its roots in the concept of the science citation index as introduced by Garfield back in the mid-1950s. This development should be acknowledged as one of the supreme achievements of the mutual cross-fertilization between information science and information technology, which, after all, share the identical research subject: information. However, the research cultures and methodologies in the two fields differ. This is not surprising. What would probably surprise a researcher in computing or information technology is the strong ideological bias present in this book.

The book is structured into seven chapters, plus an introduction and epilogue. It also contains a list of figures, acknowledgements, a preface, carefully elaborated notes, references, and an index. Judging by the structure alone, the book is as good a monograph as can be. The content can be summarized by the chapter titles: “Welcome to the Googleplex,” “Google Rules,” “Universal Libraries and Thinking Machines,” “Imagining World Brain,” “The Field of Informational Metaphysics and the Bottom Line,” “The Library of Google,” and “Savvy Searchers, Faithful Acolytes, and ‘Don’t Be Evil.’” All three authors are academics, working in the US, Canada, and Ireland in the fields of communication studies, media studies, and multimedia, respectively.

Throughout the book, the authors discuss, elaborate, use, or simply cite many authors, some of them very frequently. Although not all are devoted communists or socialists, such as S. Zizek or H. G. Wells, many, such as P. Bourdieu, had Marx as their spiritual source. The authors also build on the ideology and concepts in the Communist Manifesto, even using a quote from the book to introduce one of the sections. The quote first appears in the introduction, where they admit that they use Google even though they recognize that it is one of the key drivers in the next phase of “progress”: “All that is solid...” (the bricks-and-mortar library, the state archive, the printed book) “...melts into air” (the 24/7 privately administered universal library-cum-archive). With these words, written in 1848, Marx was describing the ability of the bourgeoisie to constantly revolutionize and the rapid improvement of all instruments. Efficiency and success of a private enterprise in 2013 is for these authors just another instance of that same ability. Here, they allow themselves a very mild and cautious criticism of Marx, who, in their view, perhaps “insufficiently anticipated capital’s peculiar forms of resiliency … that lead to the kind of innovation Google represents.”

The anti-capitalist partisanship is omnipresent in the book, reflected not only in the choice of peers to quote and elaborate, but also in the overall tone, and it cannot be overlooked. In fact, any ideology-oriented partisanship is something unexpected in a scientific book on computing. And even if some ideological bias might be normal in some fields, such as media studies, for many readers, all these kicks at the market, the Tea Party, the one percent versus the 99 percent, and OccupyX leave a bad taste. What do all of these things have to do with Google or with the culture of search?

There are many other issues on which I could comment. The book offers insight on discussions (biased or not) of several concepts that the authors consider strongly relevant to the current web search concept, such as the thinking machine, the world brain, the library of Babel, and memex. On the other hand, readers may quite often wonder if the role of Google in this book is appropriate. Leaving aside its occasional use as whipping boy, is it not premature to make strong judgments about something that started barely 15 years ago and is still evolving?

When I started the book, I was very much looking forward to an interdisciplinary discussion on perhaps the most important current concept. As I read, I became more and more uncomfortable with the possibility that on the next page, I would find a slogan like, “Searchers of all countries, occupy Google!” Coming from a country where communism caused so much disaster and misfortune during its 40-year reign, I say, “No, thanks!” to anything that turns a blind eye to these facts and continues to develop ideas from the Manifesto.

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