We needed a book like this. A book about “search” rather than Google or any of the other search-pointed companies. Its arrival is timely and on cue, especially with MSN moving bigtime into the knowledge-finding business. The book is subtitled, “How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.”

If the Web has superstars, John Battelle is one of them. Co-founding editor of Wired and Industry Standard, he is currently Chairman of the Web 2.0 conference and founder of Federated Media Publishing Inc. His entries in tech.memeorandum are inevitably weighed down with discussion links.

His book gives us a detailed history of search on the Internet, with Google always lurking in the background. When the company does come into the picture, everyone else fades away. Google is the only sexy name in search, and Battelle is aware of that.

The history of search as we know it is really the history of Google. And yet, the author brings out clearly the times when they hung on by their fingertips. He emphasizes too the debt they owed to other supporting businesses, notably GoTo.com (now Overture), whose Bill Gross came up with the non-CPM pay-per-click model that Google made its own through AdSense.

Google was not to be denied its place in the cultural history of our times. Once the model was up, and they had paid off Overture with hundreds of millions of dollars, the rise was inexorable and, if not quite exponential, it certainly looked like it.

The history of search is not yet over. As Robert Scoble has pointed out, there’s still a mighty lot to do. Whatever the future holds for Google, though, we owe them for what we have now, which, by any standards is remarkable enough.

And we owe John Battelle for writing this thoroughly readable and informative book on a subject most of us would have run from a few years ago.

Coming soon, a review of “The Google Story” by David Vise.

Check out the best price for The Search by John Battelle.