Slashdot Mirror
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.
can you do it with one click?
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?
user@host$ diff
2) It returned a lot of results
Conclusion: It works!!!
Back in the early days of the web, when Yahoo was still a catalog of links and not some super news/search/auction/ebusiness/do-it-all website that it is now, searches were much more fun.
.wav samples and more than likely an artist you'd never heard of before. That was the best part, getting introduced to things you hadn't even thought to look for.
You really never knew what would turn up as you traversed the Yahoo directory structure. You start searching for blues music and you'd end up with a list of 15 or so good links with
As search techniques are becoming more refined, we are now able to do specific word searches on websites and now books. That's fine if you know exactly what you are looking for. For example if you want to get that book about 'replicants' you'll find Blade Runner, but you won't find anything else. You won't get any information except exactly the thing you are looking for.
And I think that that is where the problem with this kind of search lies for books/music/etc. If you want to find a song or a book, it most likely isn't going to be a specific word you remember, it will be the tune or the plot, both of which are not searchable.
I don't see this improvement in Amazon's search system as that much of an improvement. A better improvement could be made to the 'We thought you'd like' feature. Instead of finding only what I'm looking for, I'd like to find other things I might also be interested in.
I remember a teacher once telling a class I was in that our essays may be compared to other essays published online to check for plagiarism.
Granted, Amazon.com's feature will only (for now) include 150,000 books, but this may very well be another way to catch plagiarizers. Just type in a suspicious phrase and see if there are any 'hits'.
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.
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.
I tried the search again today and got nearly 5,000 results, with the capability to actually look inside the book and see if the reference is useful to me. Very impressive indeed, patent or no patent.
Peer Pressure
Bash Amazon all you want, but this is a very useful technology.
In five minutes I was able to find three books that talked about findings first listed in two of my own published scientific papers, yet these books did not cite me, or anyone else, as the source of that information. My lawyer is currently preparing three letters.
I also found two other books in which the author used verbatim quotes and original theories from various interviews I have given, yet both authors passed off the statements as their own. My lawyer is now preparing five letters.
Aside from being used to protect my own research rights, I have found the search system useful for finding topics of interest discussed in certain books which are not referenced in any of the descriptions about the books. I just ordered three books I would not otherwise have ever purchased.
While I don't think highly of all of Amazon's practices, I must hand it to them for whatever technical undertaking created this search feature.
You can read the page it is on and +/- two pages.
This is equivalent of the facility you have in a physical bookstore to open a book and browse a few pages before purchasing. I can see it might be very useful, if they get the majority of books in a field accessible like this.
I wanted a PHP book the other day, and it is very difficult to decidew which one of the plethora available I wanted. So I went to my physoical bookstore. Smaller choice, but I could open each and get an impression of whther ther were slow, detail by detail, dummies books or the sort of high-speed summary I wanted.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Neat idea, but some excerpts come out all wrong:
See this for example...
Mass-OCR'ing has it's drawbacks..
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Article in December Wired talks about Amazon's book scanning, how they legally do it, who does it, how many books so far, and protections.
A full text search of slashdot, so the editors can search for duplicate articles before they post.
Scott