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I finished The Search, and can’t recommend it highly enough. Battelle manages to combine an entertaining history of search, complete with Stanford anecdotes about the nascence of Yahoo and Google, with insightful analysis of the possibilities and perils facing users and developers of search technologies. All of it is written at a level that won’t overwhelm non-geeks and won’t bore more tech-savvy readers.

It bears mentioning, however, that if you’re planning on reading the book, you should do it soon. I don’t buy hardcover books that often, but I made an exception for this title because I knew its timeliness was fleeting. The pace of the industry is such that some sections of the book are already out of date. A revised and updated version in paperback seems a virtual certainty. In the mean time, check out John’s site: http://battellemedia.com, where he continues to blog search-related items daily.

So, now it’s on to February’s selection. I picked up Just For Fun, which is a semi-auto biography of Linus Torvalds, coauthored with David Diamond. I’m not that far into it, and thus far I’m not enthralled with the odd narrative style, but I’m curious enough about Linus’s background and the origins of Linux that I’m going to stick with it.

For the record, I plan on picking books for this project fairly randomly, but as with Just For Fun, when I don’t have anything else planned, I’m taking titles from Joel Spolsky’s Fog Creek Software Management Training Program reading list, which seems to be a pretty decent curriculum for anyone who finds themselves at the intersection of business and technology.