Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters - Bill Tancer

When I first received this book I was expecting it to be a business book that talked about general search related strategies and how to utilize search to make your business better. What I got, in "Click", was a book that took me into the revealing world of online research and opened up my eyes to concepts, trends and behaviors that I never knew existed. It was a wild ride; an interesting ride; and most of all one that left me wanting to know more about online search and what secrets the data holds.

All of us tell little white lies. We all holds back the full truth more often than we will admit. Our partners, our family, our friends -- they only get a portion of the whole picture. Yet to a perfect stranger we are willing to tell the whole story. We leave nothing out; we spill our emotions, our fears and our curiosity to it without a second thought. That stranger in the night? None other than your search engine of choice. It knows more about us and what we do than our closest friend or trusted life partner.

The data reveals more about our habits and beliefs than many of us want to even admit to ourselves. We tell search engines more about out hates, our fetishes, our hungers and our pains than you could possibly imagine. When our collective searches are pulled together and analyzed, they reveal fascinating habits and trends amongst different parts of the population. Things that no survey could come close to telling us.

This book is not only suited for business people who want to understand how to analyze click and search data, but also for those of us out there who want to understand and know more about the sociology of the web itself. If you are anything like me, you will finish reading this book with a lot more questions running through your mind than before you started. If nothing else, it will help you see the Internet -- and people -- in ways you never have before.