In an interview on Guerrilla Gardening

I have to say I’m a bit bemused by your next book, The Search. What’s the history of Google got to do with guerrilla gardening?

Well, the internet is a huge landscape and it’s up to us to plant it with ideas. It’s a wonderfully democratic space, unlike the physical landscape around us. I read this book because it was recommended by a colleague at work and I was inspired to really make the most of the internet. I realised that in parallel with doing the gardening I could also plant my ideas prominently on line. My blog is there to inspire other people and it’s a very straightforward assertion that what I am doing is not to be hidden away and disguised. The beauty of the internet is that you can make a public statement without having to send it to anyone.

Guerrilla gardening is ideally suited to the internet because it’s a lot of disparate individuals or small groups generally active on a very small scale. But cumulatively, through the power of the internet bringing them together, it becomes something more tangible. And this book really helped me put my plan into action. What’s good is that the author brings it all to life in a gripping romp – part history of Google’s success and also a manual on how the web works.

In an interview on the Internet

What can we learn from the John Battelle book?

John Battelle is a very well-known technology writer in the States, and Google is really the company that single-handedly has enabled the Internet to shake off the bad image it developed through companies like Value America. Google has gone in 10 years to being the world’s largest media company. What the book does is explain not only how Google managed to do that, but also explain very clearly why the Google search algorithm outclassed the other search engines of the time. A lot of people think Google was the first search engine but it wasn’t – it was number 12 or 13, so by all rights it shouldn’t have become as successful as it did.

So, what are they doing right?

They invented a system of search based around the way in which academic papers are rated. What Larry Page and Sergey Brin did was to create something called a “page rank”, which is named after Larry Page. Page rank is the key to understanding why Google search is so much better than the others. It developed a sophisticated algorithm to show why some websites are more relevant than others. It also took links and looked at how important those links were to any particular website. The parallel that I draw is if you’re looking at books on skiing, you would take seriously a review from somebody who had won a gold medal in downhill skiing, because you would rate that review. If that review was written by the chief executive of Google you might not take it as seriously. If a skier wrote a book on technology you would probably think he should stick to the skiing. So they use the algorithm to see what the relevance of the links are. So, if it’s a travel business linking to another travel business, that is more important than some private blog linking to a travel business. That is why when you look at the Google results one is so often impressed that the results are amazingly fast and amazingly relevant to what you want. It manages to create, out of the disorder of the internet universe, relevant results. People have forgotten that when you searched before Google the results were pretty terrible. It sometimes couldn’t work out what you were looking for. Google does.

And don’t they have a different corporate culture?

They do. They have a corporate culture heavily centred around innovation. There was a time where they asked their employees to devote 20% of their time just to blue sky thinking. That was a very radical thing to do.

Is that no longer the case?

I don’t know. It was true a couple of years ago. Now it has become such a huge international corporation that I suspect some of those things may have changed in that very rapid rise.