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.

But The Search offers much more than the inside story of Google s triumph. It s a big-picture book about the past, present, and future of search technology and the enormous impact it s starting to have on marketing, media, pop culture, dating, job hunting, international law, civil liberties, and just...