Search inside the book
Amazon.com has just introduced an incredible new feature. Now when searching for books, it doesn’t just look for keywords in the title and author — it looks in the actual content of the book! Pretty amazing stuff.
I actually found this really useful today. Years ago, I read a book by (at the time) a new Australian author. It was a bit of a pulp thriller, but I really enjoyed it, and I’ve been meaning to see what the author has written since then. Problem was, I couldn’t remember the title of the book or the author. I tried a couple of Google searches as I recall but could never work out what the book was. But today I searched for “antarctica seal marines invisibility” (yes, the book did touch on all these plot points!) and found Ice Station as the sixth search result. Brilliant!
It looks as thought they’ve done a wholesale scanning of a large collection of books, and then used OCR to create the search corpus. I noticed a couple of transcription errors, but on the whole it seems to work pretty well. Try it out!
