All the Print that's fit to Crawl

December 17, 2003 12:07 PM

"It turns out that not all the world's information is already on the Internet." Google's attempt at bringing the larger text-iverse into its purview has been previously discussed here. But now it's apparently a reality, at least in a limited beta. Results from aleph to zebra.
posted by BT (10 comments total)

From today's Publisher's Lunch newsletter --

"What you can see right now is just a shadow of the larger business model that's being presented to publishers, and a Google representative has no hesitation in saying the company's mission includes getting as much information into their index possible--and books represent a huge, most untapped frontier...

"As implied though not made explicit in our conversation with a Google spokesperson, the goal seems to be to truly "Google" book content, or as much as they can get their hands on. The company is talking to publishers about officially launching in the first or second quarter of next year. In the first phase, publishers have been told that registered visitors would be able to access up to 10 percent of the full text of a book within a month. (This figure was reportedly arrived at so as to be more moderate than Amazon's initially controversial 20 percent ceiling.) Longer term, Google is describing what one person called a "dashboard" that would let publishers control precisely how much text would be accessible, up to full text.
"Not only is Google providing links to multiple online retailers, but they are also offering publishers a revenue share arrangement, that's roughly equivalent to a 50/50 share of any AdWords revenue from a publisher's content. From early impressions, Google is telling publishers they are very flexible about customizing the pages--so that publishers can link back to their own sites, sell directly, influence the branding of the pages, and more."

Sorry, I don't know if there's any linkable archive of these newsletters, hence the long excerpt instead of a link.
posted by BT at 12:17 PM on December 17, 2003

The combination of this with Amazon's full text search will become very interesting indeed.
posted by SealWyf at 12:27 PM on December 17, 2003

I hate that "It turns out" construction that so many technical people use. It's wicked smarmy.
posted by dougb at 12:57 PM on December 17, 2003

I hate that "It turns out" construction that so many technical people use. It's wicked smarmy.

When you do what Google does, you have the right to grandstand a bit.
posted by SweetJesus at 1:53 PM on December 17, 2003

Wow, I've been working on a site that plays off a similar concept (though takes it further in terms of content, but not as far in terms of searchability - yet) so this is fascinating to me. I find it interesting because we've been working on the idea for well over a year and a half, so this development is really going to light a fire under our development team (me). :)
posted by fizgig at 2:04 PM on December 17, 2003

How do they determine the relevancy of the content found in books? Seems as though it would be difficult to replicate the relevancy of pageranked results in books.
posted by zeoslap at 2:26 PM on December 17, 2003

Maybe they could use the pagerank of pages that reference those books. You could use search pages that have the title mentioned (or linked to on amazon or bn) or have the ISBN. Those pages will often mention other books too, and you could view the books mentioned together as "linked."
posted by sonofsamiam at 2:35 PM on December 17, 2003

Maybe they could use the pagerank of pages that reference those books. You could use search pages that have the title mentioned (or linked to on amazon or bn) or have the ISBN. Those pages will often mention other books too, and you could view the books mentioned together as "linked."

For scholarly books, they might be able to use bibliography and footnotes to rank books.

It's probably gonna be a while before their software can figure out which of Shakespeare's plays all those novels are alluding to, however.
posted by straight at 7:41 AM on December 18, 2003

From the "About us" section of fizgig's site:

Think of us as a virtual book touring service, bringing authors and their audiences, book professionals and the media together from around the globe and around the clock using a robust range of online and offline advertising, promotion and publicity techniques. We work with authors and publishers to create custom communications networks, online and offline, trade and consumer, through a combination of digital production, book trade, promotion and.publicity, and reader services.

I think you need to do some serious work on this; it gives me only the vaguest idea of what the site is about, and no incentive to stick around. (I also don't see what it has in common with text search.) Not a knock, just editorial advice.
posted by languagehat at 8:08 AM on December 18, 2003

So where's Borges?
posted by cobra libre at 4:53 PM on December 18, 2003