Older friends of mine gasp at the realization that i’ve never done research without the web. Yet, despite the web, i’ve always had one problem that has haunted me. Sure, i can read many computer-related journals and articles, look up any book and read anyone’s college essay on most topics, but there are so many books that i just stare at and scream grep.
Grep.
I just want grep to work on my books. Well, gosh darn, Amazon went and invented it. They were sent from the heavens i tell you. This will revolutionize the next generation of college students.
full text search
Today Amazon.com made the full text of 120000 books searchable. If you want to find books that mention cybertext, for instance, search books for cybertext, just as usual, but while that search yesterday listed books with cybertext in the title,…
Oh my. Thanks for pointing that out. Wow.
But really, is it grep? is there a * $ or -c involved…I think not!
OK, fine, it’s not really a grep… But it’s awefully close and makes me quite happy!
Apparently, any author who wishes to have their book removed can do so, according to the Author’s Guild: http://volokh.com/#106709335886539688
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. A year from now, I’d like to see the results of a study showing the effects of allowing full-text search on the sales of particular books in various genres.
Here’s a great note i’ve received via email:
* Someone on Slashdot pointed out that Amazon allows you to view the page after the one on which it found a match, which then allows you to take key words from that page, search for them, find that page and get to the next one. In other words, once you have page i, you can get page i+1 by first going to the “next page” link, then searching for some keywords from that page. A proof by induction!
Also, people have been pointing out lots of questions about copyright – is this a copyright violation? What about when it’s used for academic purposes? What if you own all of the books? Mmm.. fun thing to chew on.
Personally, i want Amazon to add a function where you can list all of the books in your library and search your own library, regardless of copyright. I mean, i *own* my books, right?
Hmm, I suspect the only way amazon would do that (search your own library) is if you bought the books from them or had some sort of ‘amazon gold’ subscription.
The bigger question is how much did it cost to do this, and why can’t a network of libraries do the exact same thing for their students? Maybe in some sort of distrubted text scanning project.
Wired Article: Search all Knowledge!
Back in October, danah blogged about Amazon’s brand-new, full-text-searchable database of 120,000 of its books. Wired is about to publish an article on this Very Cool Thing. It’s available on the web now. Of particular interest to me were Amazon’s…