Google Print

Google Print, yet another spin-off of Amazon's much lauded Search Inside the Book feature, seems to be this week's web darling, with many mentions in blogs and whatnot -- this all seemingly before there's an actual working product. Google describes the project thusly: "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Since a lot of the world's information isn't yet online, we're helping to get it there." Tara Calishain, author of Google Hacks, however, notes in her library news blog, ResearchBuzz, that while there is a program being put in place for commercial publishers to add their content, the same is not true for university presses or online books. Tara has another concern:

Before the program was officially announced, the content of Google Print was integrated into the Google index. This meant that with some judicious use of special syntax you could search just the print materials. ... However, the Google rep informs me that "Unlike the first phase of Google Print, these results are not integrated into the main Google search index." What does this mean? a) No ability to isolate the Google Print content -- possibly no ability to run extensive general searches for content, b) No ability to set up search alerts to get information on new content as it's added to the index, and c) no ability to access Google Print content through Google API calls.

Posted by Tom on October 07, 2004