Google turns a new page with book search feature

Google, the search engine, has ripped a page out of Amazon.com’s book, debuting a way for people to search through text that was once e...

Google, the search engine, has ripped a page out of Amazon.com’s book, debuting a way for people to search through text that was once exclusively located offline and stashed between book covers.

It announced the ‘Google Print Beta’ service last week. To use it, go to Google’s search engine and, in the usual place, type in ‘print.google.com’ followed by whatever subject. Books that this search feature turns up are preceded by a bracketed tag that reads ‘Book-beta’; click on each link and you’ll see excerpts from the text, plus links to the Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million sites that let you buy the title.

Google says it uses the same software to comb through the text of books that the site uses to index the Web. The site has been on a development tear this season, introducing all sorts of widgets that embed its search tools deeper into Web users’ lives, such as toolbar add-ons that conduct a Web search without even starting up their browser. In this case, however, Google trailed Amazon by a few months —the retailer’s ‘search inside the book’ feature debuted in October. It drew some flak from authors and publishers at its start; some scribes worried that the service would give people a reason not to purchase hard copies of their work at all.

Google is much less complete in this early state — the site would not disclose the number of titles it has indexed so far. Sometimes Google calls a new feature ‘beta’ even when it feels darn near like a finished product. This, on the other hand, is a project that seems like it’s still in test mode, thanks to the limited number of titles that crop up on early tryouts. We did a search on ‘beer’ late this week for example, and — what the heck? — the first link was to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, which mentions the popular beverage in a discussion about the hospitality in Bilbo Baggins’ hometown. A search on the term ‘vacation’ meanwhile, turned up a children’s book (‘Clowns on Vacation’ by Nina Laden).—(LATWP)