WEB SITE REVIEW
Search 2.0: Google scans in books to expand scope
By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post
The search engine Google has ripped a page out of Amazon.com's book, debuting a way for people to search through text that was once exclusively located offline and stashed between book covers. Who knew that books would turn out to be a new flashy feature for the Internet this year?
The search engine has launched a Google Print Beta service. To use it, go to Google's search engine and, in the usual place, type in "print.google.com" followed by whatever subject your heart desires.
Books that this search feature turns up are preceded by a bracketed tag that reads "BOOK — BETA"; click on each link and you'll see excerpts from the text, plus links to the Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million sites that let you buy the title. (Google said it does not profit if users purchase a book this way.)
Google says it uses the same software to comb through the text of books (scanned in one at a time) that it uses to index the Web. Google has been on a development tear this season, introducing all sorts of widgets that embed its search tools deeper into Web users' lives, such as toolbar add-ons that let folks conduct a Web search without even starting up their browser.
In this case, however, Google trailed Amazon by a few months — the retailer's "search inside the book" feature debuted in October. It drew some flak from authors and publishers at its start; some scribes worried that the service would give people a reason not to purchase hard copies of their work (especially reference manuals, such as cookbooks) at all.
Amazon's version features some 120,000 titles from 190 publishers, or 33 million pages of searchable text. Google's is much less complete in this early state — the site would not disclose the number of titles it has indexed so far.
Sometimes Google calls a new feature beta even when it feels darn near like a finished product. This, on the other hand, is a project that seems like it's still in test mode, thanks to the limited number of titles that crop up on early tryouts.
We did a search on "beer" late this week for example, and — what the heck? — the first link was to J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Fellowship of the Ring," which mentions the popular drink in a discussion about the hospitality in Bilbo Baggins' hometown. A search on "vacation" turned up a children's book, "Clowns on Vacation" by Nina Laden.
