Amazon now searches the full text of books.

Here is nice article on the subject

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60948,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

Jason Watts
Thursday, October 23, 2003

I saw that... Pretty impressive.

www.MarkTAW.com
Friday, October 24, 2003

> Fortunately, mass scanning has grown increasingly feasible, with the cost dropping to as low as $1 each.

Any idea how/where to find out more about that? I know someone who owns several thousand (scholarly) books, wants to keep (use) them, but lacks the space to store them.

Christopher Wells
Friday, October 24, 2003

Yeah, too bad their search is worthless now, because they don't have the expertise (and dataset) of a Google to help guarantee that the right answer will be on the first page of results.

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Friday, October 24, 2003

"Yeah, too bad their search is worthless now, because they don't have the expertise (and dataset) of a Google to help guarantee that the right answer will be on the first page of results."

Ah, but, in the last page of the article it mentions:
"This fall, Amazon announced that it was forming A9.com, a new company devoted exclusively to search technologies."

Though how long they'll take to make a "Google" is anyone's guess.

Nobby Good Guy
Friday, October 24, 2003

Amazon wants to compete with Google by building a search engine that finds stores online - too many people go to Google when shopping than Amazon, and they want to change that. So it's not a head-on competition, they only want the commerce sliver of the search engine. Though I guess it would be a kick in the revenue stream.

www.MarkTAW.com
Friday, October 24, 2003

This actually makes it less useful. When I was searching for books related to a subject area, it turned up a bazillion books that just happened to mention the search words on page X, although the books have very little to do with the subject.

They don't provide a simple way to do the search in the original manner in which they would only search on title, author, and subject keywords.

T. Norman
Saturday, October 25, 2003

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