Re: Google Print Home Page now offers searching

["Dr. James J. O'Donnell" <provost@georgetown.edu>]

The surprising aspect of this is the size and variety of the academic
collection of humanities titles that is covered by a search here.  But the
absolutely maddening aspect is that this kind of search-by-snippets is of
very limited use and so cripples the normal function of a "book" as to be
a form of torture.  On a typical search you are allowed to read the page
on which the search term appears and the two pages before and after. Now,
in one case, because I know the book, I was able to figure out a search
term that would probably let me see *almost* every page of the book, as
long as I were willing to do a cumbersome sequence of clicks to "page"  
through the book.  But the natural use of the book consequent to such a
search -- "aha, he talks about X, so let me look at the context" -- is
what you can't do.

(That clever link to search almost every page will be defeated because in
every title, a set of pages has been made inaccessible to display:  "As
part of our efforts to protect a book's copyright, a set of pages in every
in-copyright book will be unavailable to all users.")

So:  if books are collections of facts and the function of a search is to
find facts, this is almost useable some of the time.  If books are books,
it's a bizarre parody of what scholars and students might actually do.  I
will have to think long and hard about whether and how to introduce this
function to students.

But it's awfully useful for a new form of autogoogling -- looking yourself
up to see who quotes you.

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown University

On Tue, 31 May 2005, Sloan, Bernie wrote:

> I just noticed that the Google Print home page now has a search box, so
> you can search books directly.
>
> http://print.google.com/