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Google Book Search in action: ‘Happy accidents’
August 23, 2007 | 2:01 pm
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By David Rothman
Warning: Here’s a hype alert. The gung-ho users, a grad student and a blogger (A Dress a Day), focus on the positive.
Still, this Google video shows the amount of serendipity that keyword searches and other features of Google Book Search can bring about.
With the technology perfected and enough content online someday, many more “happy accidents” could happen than through shelf-based searches of p-libraries. Tagging and focused blogs would also foster this kind of happiness. Hello, Geoffrey Nunberg? Care to reconsider?
Disclosure: I own a tiny, tiny slice of Google in my undersized retirement account, though you’d never know it from the number of times I beat up on ‘em. In fact, here’s a pointer to Peter Brantley’s blog item on the controversy about the quality of Google’s digitization efforts. (Thanks for the vid link, Tamas.)
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Comments:
They make a valid point about indexing.
Creating a book index manually just cannot compete with the full text search provided by a computer.
A related note:
recently Google Earth received a Google book Search layer that lets you find books that mention a place.
Hey, Tamas, we had the geo-search item some months ago. But thanks for the update–Google has added new wrinkles. As for indexing, some would agree with you and some wouldn’t. Remember, indexers index concepts, not just keyword equivalents. Thanks. David
re: geo-search
I think first they added a map to the book search so that you could see the places mentioned in a book plotted on the map.
The new feature is sort of turning this upside down: show me the books that mention this place.
It’s a new view on the same data.
I think it only makes sense if you are searching for mentions of a very specific place, such as a village…