Many books have been written on the Google phenomenon. Not surprising perhaps given the extraordinary groundbreaking success of the company in eight short years.

I want to look at two of the best titles on the Mountain View, Calif., company. Tomorrow, we’ll review The Google Story by David Wise, today, The Search by John Battelle.

We needed a book like this, concentrating mostly on search rather than the company per se. 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 techmeme.com 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. There’s still a 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.

The author of this site is currently unwell.

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Yesterday’s entry in Google’s Official Blog was an announcement about the new Google Book Search beta which allows you to not just search for a book, you can search for a specific line of text from a book.

From the Google Book Search site:

When we find a book whose content contains a match for your search terms, we’ll link to it in your search results. Click a book title and you’ll see the Snippet View which, like a card catalog, shows information about the book plus a few snippets - a few sentences of your search term in context. You may also see the Sample Pages View if the publisher or author has given us permission or the Full Book View if the book is out of copyright. In all cases, you’ll also see ‘Buy this Book’ links that lead directly to online bookstores where you can buy the book.

In addition to the search site Google has also launched an attached blog which features interesting tidbits related to Google Book Search.

Google Book Search Home Page

Google Book Search Official Blog

Today Google has launched six new personalized home page editions. These new pages are for readers in Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland and New Zealand.

Google has included many great features including their gadget for the World Cup, which will allow football (soccer here in the states) fans to follow scores, standings and schedules for their favorite team.

All the other standard features you have come to expect from your personalized Google Home Page are featured as well including news, weather, GMail and your favorite RSS feeds.