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

What does the world want? According to John Battelle, a company that answers that question-in all its shades of meaning-can unlock the most intractable riddles of business and arguably of human culture itself. And for the past few years, that's exactly what Google has been doing.

Jumping into the game long after Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, and other pioneers, Google offered a radical new approach to search, redefined the idea of viral marketing, survived the dot-com crash, and pulled of…