The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture

I am really enjoying The Search by John Battelle. Send me your address and I will send you a copy. Battelle describes the state of the art in search when Google was founded as Backrub (Alta Vista was leading edge). Google's founders, Page and Brin set out to solve the relevancy problem by looking at how links to and from a site can be weighted. Of course FastCall solves another relevancy problem by analyzing CDRs (the call experience). Google's algorithms were not designed to measure the relevancy of a local business. They were designed to differentiate Intel's link to IBM.com from a hobbyist link to IBM.com (the example used in the book).

I'll post more thoughts later. In the meantime, here's what Amazon has to say:
http://www.amazon.com/
...The Search: it's probably on Bill Gates' reading list, and that of almost every venture capitalist and startup-hungry entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. In its sweeping survey of the history of Internet search technologies, its gossip about and analysis of Google.

Author John Battelle was a founder of The Industry Standard and then one of the original editors of Wired.