Google Book Search

Google tends not to herald the launch or development of its projects, perhaps because of their great number. Word of a project is spread like a paper boat, placed on a slow-moving stream and allowed to drift where it may.

Google Book Search's development has reached a point where it is being noticed by tech blogs, and in turn people like me. GBS is a mix of Amazon's book search and The Gutenberg Project, the online repository of non-copyrighted literature, along with a few neat features of its own.

Searching for a subject or phrase brings up a list of relevant books as one would expect. If the work is copyrighted, you can usually read several to dozens of pages of the book, search within it, and other typical activities. It is similar to Amazon's book search feature, although a little more accessible. One neat feature is that you can view passages the book cites that other books have cited too.

If the work is in the public domain, then you can read the entire book, download a PDF of it, and also select passages to easily share with others (if you have a Blogger account). You can share the text or an image of the page. After reading a brief account of Cortez's conquest of Montezuma and the Aztec, I took a stab at seeing what I could find.

The History of Mexico and Its Wars: Comprising an Account of the Aztec ... By John Frost: ""

After you find a book, there is a nifty "Find it in a library" link along with links to booksellers.

There is also a "My Library" section that I haven't played with, but looks like a way to save book titles you have or want.

GBS could potentially be a wonderful research tool, and also a frustrating reminder of how having information accessible doesn't mean it will be easy to find.

For all of the wonders of Google, I believe search technology is still rudimentary and only does 10% of what it could do. The perfect search engine wouldn't be a search engine. It would be an answer engine. You could type any question in it, however complex, and get an answer if the information to answer the question exists.

Current search technology is focused on quantity, not quality. If you type, "State bird South Carolina" you get over 2 million results. Why? It's a simple question with only one answer (Great Carolina Wren). Why isn't the answer the first result?

If you ask a slightly harder question, like "What was the first state to have a state bird?" or a tough one like "What was the original motivation for creating a state bird?" good luck finding a decent answer, or even knowing the best way to phrase your query.

I like Google. Projects like Google Book Search and Google Maps show the company's unparalleled ability to gather and index information. But it also makes me frustrated knowing that what I want is out there, somewhere, but I just can't find it.