The Search by John Battelle

An account of the rise of Google with some mentions of Altavista, Yahoo! and other search engine companies. I found it most interesting where it was covering the early days; the last few chapters of speculation about the future of search, I thought less good, in particular, I don't think there will be any financial incentive for the creation of a historical archive of the web.

The success of Google can be seen as an example of a technically clean solution (the PageRank algorithm) triumphing over messier, technically inferior ones. I admit, though, that the good business judgement of the Google founders also had something to do with it (also, the algorithm that Google uses has probably now evolved into something hideously complex).