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How Google Is Solving Its Book Problem
Pickens writes "Alexis Madrigal writes in the Atlantic that Google's famous PageRank algorithm can't be deployed to search through the 15 million books that Google has already scanned because books don't link to each other in the way that webpages do. Instead Google's new book search algorithm called 'Rich Results' looks at word frequency, how closely your query matches the title of a book, web search frequency, recent book sales, the number of libraries that hold the title, how often an older book has been reprinted, and 100 other signals. 'There is less data about books than web pages, but there is more structure to it, and there's less spam to contend with,' writes Madrigal. Yet the focus on optimizing an experience from vast amounts of data remains. 'You want it to have the standard Google quality as much as possible,' says Matthew Gray, lead software engineer for Google Books. '[You want it to be] a merger of relevance and utility based on all these things.'"
But do they really have to shred all the books just to scan them?
With a pen.
I have always wondered why the text in these books is not clear. The blurry fonts make my eyes hurt and surely, Google can create a better interface for the main page. Just 1 million dollars can do so much if some expert were hired to revamp the site. Come on Google!
they already do that via Google Scholar. Scientific paper searches often (maybe not often enough) bring up textbook references. I know searching through regular Google does quite frequently.
You're not taking into consideration the energy required to make the book, or to transport it to the marketplace. The amount of carbon sequestered in the physical pages of a book is insignificant in comparison.
The production of a book releases 8.85 lbs. of CO_2:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/emeraldcity/2008/06/paper-vs-paperl.html
Here's a page which indicates most CO_2 production is for energy:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggrpt/carbon.html
And here's a page which indicates that CO_2 production is a much larger problem for the manufacturing of electronics:
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/49730
w/ a ratio of 12 to 1 for energy usage to weight, so my PRS-505 weighs roughly 9 ozs., so presumably required 108 ounces of fuel to manufacture (on-going energy usage is trivial and not considered)
http://www.epa.gov/oms/climate/420f05001.htm
gives us a figure of 19.4 pounds of CO_2 per gallon of gasoline which equals roughly 16.36875 pounds of CO_2 to make the ebook reader.
So getting two books for the Sony should make it roughly break even, and each printed book beyond that which is not purchased should result in a net reduction of CO_2 emissions, since the energybulletin.net page indicates that the embodied energy usage for electronics is much greater than the lifetime usage.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
there's a whole branch of science that studies writing and drawing while in an ocean, it's called oceanographics
rewriting history since 2109
I suspect this is as much to do with the uptake in ebook readers as any change to the search indexing. Previously, if you were searching for this book you probably had a very specific interest in it and often wanted to buy a copy, now the people searching are more likely looking for free reading material, so the ranks have adjusted to accommodate that (since "people looking for free stuff" is a much wider market than "people with interest in a particular book", so it's easy to swing the ranking in favour of the former).
Shouldn't that be "are fewer data"?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.