ResourceBlog Article: Breaking News: Amazon Debuts Full-Text Search For 120,000 Titles

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Thursday, 23rd October 2003

Breaking News: Amazon Debuts Full-Text Search For 120,000 Titles

Searchable Databases--Books
Breaking News: Amazon Debuts New Search Tool, Acccess the Full-Text from 120,000 Book Titles
The new service (online today) is called "Search Inside the Book" and allows you to search the full-text, over 33 million pages from over 120,000 titles. CBS Marketwatch reports that over 190 publishers are participating including Wiley, Time Warner Book Group, Simon & Schuster, Inc., Random House, Inc., Publishers Group West, Incorporated, McGraw-Hill Professional, Holtzbrinck Publishers and HarperCollins Publishers. Of course the full-text from 120,000 titles can have enormous research and reference value. However, Amazon's primary motivation for offering this service is to sell books. netLibrary is an example of a service geared toward the researcher. The company is calling this new service, "a significant extension" to "Look Inside the Book" service which has been online since October, 2001.
How Does "Search Inside the Book" Work?
+ Access is via any Amazon search box.
+ Enter your search terms. Phrase searching with quotation marks.
+ No advanced search capabilities or search limits are available.
+ A list of all titles is returned. However, some titles contain extra information and links appearing directly below the pricing information. They begin with the word "exceprt." Click here and you'll see a scanned image of the page with your search term(s) highlighted. You can then browse (forward or backwards one page at a time) using links above the page image. You can also move forward by simply clicking on the page image.
+ You'll need to be registered with Amazon.Com to access the full-text.
+ Amazon is using optical character recognition technology to find words embedded in the scanned images.
+ Searching for phrases can be imprecise. I ran a search for "sports broadcaster" and received many false drops.
+ Implied "AND" between terms.
+ It's also possible to find a title and then search within it. For example, note the "search inside this book" label above the cover image.
+ Table of Contents and Index pages do not contain hyperlinks.
+ An illustrated example page is available here. An FAQ is also online.
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+ I've noticed that the full-text from many of IDG's "...For Dummies" books are included. If you do a keyword search add "for dummies" to help focus your search.
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+ Some of you might be interested to learn that many libraries offer access to thousands of web accessible full-text titles via netLibrary. This service offers full-text searching and many other options. Ask your librarian if you have access to it. If you do, you'll most likely be able to can access the database from ANY computer. Ebrary is another company in this space. The National Academy Press continues to offer free web accessible full-text access to over 2500 titles.
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See Also: Publishers Grudgingly Cooperate With Amazon Database Effort (via Publishers Weekly)
See Also: "Amazon Plan Would Allow Searching Texts of Many Books" (via the NY Times, 7/21/03)

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