"Summary:The traditional search engine will evolve into a digital personal assistant that tracks your activities and automatically delivers helpful information, according to Microsoft's Stefan Weitz, whose excellent book takes an optimistic view of this future while acknowledging the potential pitfalls." - Sean McBride

"In Search: How the Data Explosion Makes Us Smarter, Stefan Weitz, director of search at Bing, suggests that search could be the 'hinge' linking us and the technology that describes almost everything around us, and the implications of that are profound. Because if search can cover everything -- indexing and understanding everything in the world, gaining senses like hearing, touching and even smelling as well as seeing everything, and communicating in different way with us and with other systems on our behalf -- then we have a lot of questions to ask about how those systems are designed and what we want them to be able to do. If search is going to connect us to the world, then in some ways it will become our world." - Sean McBride

"The question is whether that's a good or bad thing, and Weitz notes some of the issues explicitly as he goes along. He devotes several chapters to covering the technical problems, the self-perpetuating business models and the privacy and security issues that could derail his idea of search as an ever-present assistant, gently improving your world without you doing anything more than living your life ("all watched over by machines of loving grace", as the poem puts it). That might be a nudge to order something healthy, drinks that get more expensive the drunker you get, an agent that shows you relevant messages and documents just before a meeting or any other way the system could anticipate your needs." - Sean McBride

"But Weitz admits that he's a techno-optimist and highlights the potential benefits along with the risks. And along the way, you get a detailed survey of key developments from the beginning of web search -- with one of the clearest explanations of what the graphs that connect information are really about -- to the way all our technologies are starting to matter to search. Images with metadata, video that gets automatically transcribed, identity information from social networks and the signals that clicking 'like' might represent, apps that drive services in the real world like Uber and IFTTT, smart devices and sensors, digital invitations to events, places where you check in, payment systems: Weitz shows you how much of the developed world is already digitized and looks at systems like Wolfram Alpha that pull together that information and turn it into answers. (For a book written by someone who works at Microsoft, there is very little Microsoft-specific technology here, apart from a few fascinating glimpses of experimental systems running at Microsoft Research)." - Sean McBride