Search lite: you may think Google is powerful today, but it's still only using 5% of its brain.

• Author: Kounalakis, Markos
• Position: On Political Books - The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture - Book Review

The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture By John Battelle Portfolio Cover, $25.95

What is Google if not opposition research for the rest of us? For years, we have dated, taken jobs, applied to schools, trusted sources, relied on friends, and done countless tasks requiring our time and effort without the aid of a reliable, fast, effective search engine to tell us if we are wasting our time and energies. It now takes fractions of a second to learn that Greenland is not really all that green and that the environmental policies of the Bush administration are not either.

John Battelle adds an important volume to the history of the Silicon Valley by documenting the development of Google. Like those before him, he has approached an obscure and intangible subject which affects the way nearly everyone lives, works, and loves. Battelle has done the long-term reporting required to give The Search the social and technological context of our time as well as a decent insight into Google founders (Wunderkinder Sergey Brin and Larry Page) and their motivations.

Battelle, who was the co-founder of Wired and former publisher of The Industry Standard magazines, is in a unique position to do this reporting. (Full disclosure: I know Battelle slightly.) He is personally passionate about where technology is taking us and how it is taking us there. And his passion was clearly what got him a book contract to write about something that most of us take for granted--the ability to type a few words into a small white box with a blinking cursor and expect to get relevant and interesting information. And to do this free, globally, and instantaneously.

We have seen this in-depth treatment of technologies in the past with the development of computing (e.g., The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder), gaming, software, the Internet ... the list is endless. The value of these books seems to be greater as historical documents and business case studies than as dynamic reads for the average electronics consumer.

This class of book will be good reading for those who want to know that "search" of any form is com posed of three specific functions: crawl, index, and serve. For search to work, it must "crawl" the web and find unique and connected data, it must then index that data in retrievable and presentable form, and it must serve that data in a simple, fast, and relevant fashion to he who seeks. To do this, Google has more...