Amazon Launches Full Text Book Search

m00nun1t writes "Amazon have launched a new service that allows you to search the full text of books. This sounds like an incredibly useful function as well as technically impressive at this scale. I wonder if a patent is in the works." Or if a patent is already owned.

Comments

abuse

[technix4beos]

I can almost hear the screams of joy from the underground book pirates.

How easy can this service be abused, with automatic webbots doing the searching?

I can imagine there might be filters, time limits, and max searchs/day limits for something of this scale, no?

Re:abuse

[Maskirovka]

How easy can this service be abused, with automatic webbots doing the searching?
You can only browse two pages in either direction per search. You also have to be logged in. I suppose someone could script a system to create thousands of account, then use an army of zombie machines to OCR the pages from a variety of different IPs. That is assuming that Amazon has EVERY page of every book available to the service, which I doubt.

It would probably by easier to coble together a robot built around a laptop with an ocr equiped camera and book manipulation software and set it loose in a big library at night. For 50 years.

No Searching Inside O'Reilly Books

[theodp]

Even though he said he was 'blown away' by Amazon's new Search Inside the Book feature, Tim O'Reilly has decided not to participate in the program for now. 'If they end up being a Google for published content...we need to think better about what publishers get out of it,' he said.

Re:No Searching Inside O'Reilly Books

[Zeddicus_Z]

As a Safari subscriber, I'd say it's probably because Full Text Search of online book content is also present at O'Reilly's own Safari online tech book site. You've been able to do the same thing Amazon is now crowing about, on every book Safari has, since launch quite some time ago (year or two perhaps?)

Safari is more of a "service" (i.e. renting access to book content) than a "feature" of a retail website, which is all Amazon's "innovation" seems to be.

Basically the only real different between the two (aside from what is cited above) is that Amazon just lets you know the content is mentioned, and shows you a page or two. Safari gives you the entire book. That and that Amazon has a much wider range of books in non-tech genres

Here's a quote relevant to the parent post

[Anonymous Coward]

There's books about everything:

Encyclopedia of New Media : An Essential Reference to Communication and Technology -- Steve Jones (Editor); Hardcover

Excerpt from page 0: ". . . post-ranking system used by members the of Web message board Slashdot.org, began as a result of community self- restraint in the face of unrelenting trolls (pointlessly hostile posters). In addition, some cyberspace forums now require . . ."

See more references to slashdot troll in this book.

Re:Amazon...

[will_die]

It is really nice, I was using amazon right as they switched it one.
I was searching for books on Object Role Modeling(ORM), I had first done a search for ORM and did not find anything of interest. They then switched it on while I did a search of 'Object Role Modeling', this poped up a few books with the text where it was being used.

Re:Yeah, but..

[KDan]

Some web sites have 100's of A4 pages, but google still returns in a jiffy. I'm pretty sure their book collection is well indexed, if they're offering this service. Probably with the google engine, too.

Daniel

Scanner problems

[thrill12]

Neat idea, but some excerpts come out all wrong:
See this for example...
Mass-OCR'ing has it's drawbacks..

Re:Indexing mechanism

[real bio]

Yes, but searching pages scanned/OCR'ed and highlighting the keywords has been a feature of Google search for a long time:

Google Catalogs (Beta)

It's very probable that they licensed the Catalog Search technology from Google.