Bio
John Battelle
John Battelle is an entrepreneur, journalist, professor, and author. Currently founder and chairman of Federated Media Publishing, he is also a founder and executive producer of conferences in the media, technology, communications, and entertainment industries as well as "band manager" with BoingBoing.net.
Previously, Battelle was founder, chairman, and CEO of Standard Media International (SMI), publisher of The Industry Standard and TheStandard.com. Prior to founding The Standard, Battelle was a co-founding editor of Wired magazine and Wired Ventures.
He is the author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (Portfolio, 2005).
Steven Levy
Steven Levy has been covering the digital revolution for more than 25 years. Before joining WIRED in 2008, he was chief technology correspondent at Newsweek. He is the author of seven books, most recently the New York Times best seller In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. Other books include Insanely Great, on the history of Apple's Macintosh computer, and Hackers, which was named the best tech book of the PC era by PC Magazine.
Encyclopædia Britannica Article
- search engine
Tool for finding information, especially on the Internet or World Wide Web. Search engines are essentially massive databases that cover wide swaths of the Internet. Most consist of three parts: at least one program, called a spider, crawler, or bot, which crawls through the Internet gathering information; a database, which stores the gathered information; and a search tool, with which users search through the database by typing in keywords describing the information desired (usually at a Web site dedicated to the search engine). Increasingly, metasearch engines, which search a subset (usually 10 or so) of the huge number of search engines and then compile and index the results, are being used.
- search engine on britannica.com
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