Book Search Mashup
I built this little app in response to a complaint in
this blog post by Tim O'Reilly - that the various competing Book Search engines that let you search
inside books (
Google Books,
Amazon Search Inside/A9 &
MSN Live Book Search) are in proprietary bins. They require the searcher to either guess which website is most likely to house the results they want, or to try them one after the other.
Okay, well, it's easy enough to gather them all into one meta-page, so I did:
http://kokogiak.com/booksearch/ - search all 3 at once.
It's been interesting to see the quantity/quality differences between the 3 in trying several searches. Results for "
ajax", for instance - Amazon is all current programming books, Google is a mix of classic mythology and programming, and MSN is all classic mythology.
It may not solve the problem of making all the big boys play nice together and share their scanning efforts for the greater good, but it at least puts it all on the same page.
3 Comments +
Very nice,thank you! - if You could add other localized Sites of Amazon and Google. it would fit the interests of many users in addition :-). - As I am living in Germany I looked for instance for "Sigfried Krakauer" and was quiet sad, to find only three secondary texts with Booksearch for this great german "Gedankengänger".
...if I search with "SiEgfried Krakauer" - the correct spelling! - there are some more results ;-).
I just found this site which looks very helpful. However, I have noticed that the title links in A9 do not work. :( (5/31/07)
