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TOURBUS Volume 9, Number 18 -- 23 Oct 2003
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Amazon's "Search Inside the Book" Feature
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Amazon has updated its search engine. Not only can you search for books
that
focus on a particular keyword, you can now also search for books that
CONTAIN a particular keyword. Just hop on over to
http://www.amazon.com/
and in the orangeish search box choose "Books" in the pull-down list
and type in a keyword like, oh, say "badgers." You'll see a normal
Amazon search results page with one small difference: Several of the
hits include links to excerpts from the accompanying book. Click on
an excerpt's link and one of three things will happen:
1. If you have a free Amazon account but haven't been to Amazon
in a while, you'll be asked to key in your email address and
Amazon password. Once you do, an excerpted page from the book
will automatically appear with your keyword highlighted in
green. [Think catalogs.google.com with a different highlight
color.]
2. If you've been to Amazon recently and Amazon has stored your
email address and password on your computer in the form of a
cookie, the highlighted page will automagically appear. No
muss, no fuss.
3. If you DON'T have a free Amazon account, you'll be asked to
create a new one before you can see anything. Since the
material that Amazon is about to show you is copyrighted,
Amazon understandably needs to know who you are. Fortunately,
the registration process is painless.
Once the excerpted page appears, you can browse through that
particular book and even see all that book's references to your
keyword. Just look for the navigation bar above the excerpted page.
Amazon currently lets you search through the text of about 120,000
books. That sounds like a lot, but remember that most major
university libraries contain in excess of five MILLION books. So, if
you are hoping that Amazon's new search feature will save you a trip
to your local library the next time you have to do some scholarly
research, expect to be disappointed. But, Amazon's new search inside
the book feature it is still a wonderful addition and a nice start to
what I expect to eventually become a very popular research tool.
