John Battelle's The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture is a book that, when the contract for it was announced in 2002, was probably the most anticipated book with the most interesting subject and the hottest author in tech-business journalism.

Still, books take a long time to write. Battelle -- who founded the Industry Standard, a now defunct newsweekly that aspired to be the Economist of the dot-com boom but plummeted into bankruptcy in 2001 -- knew he had to maintain his status as pundit. So in fall 2003, he began blogging about writing The Search.