The Search is a cross between a business book and an attempt at cultural anthropology. Battelle examines the short, recent history of the search industry, naturally focusing on Google. He knows (or at least has interviewed) many of the key players, and he covers the history well. Battelle is very colloquial in his presentation, and as a result, the book is accessible to a general audience.

Although he acknowledges that search — as a problem — is only about 5% solved, Battelle doesn't really touch at all upon what the remaining 95% comprises. I'm interested in how search can be applied to images, audio, and video without the need for intermediate human tagging, and it would have been nice to touch on some of the work being done in those areas.