Brave New World - a new dawn for the Internet

Google rocks, and LexisNexis rocks even more but you have to pay for it.

But neither I think compare to the innovation Amazon.com has just wrought. FULL TEXT SEARCHING of thousands of books (and soon all of them)... and when you use your amazon login and password you can view the entire page and several surrounding page. You can't even do this at your local college library folks. This is a librarian's wet dream.

Right now you can go on Amazon.com and search through tiki books, or, like I just did, Penthouse Letters :P

It's a whole new world.

Here's an article about it:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2090298/

But better yet, go try it out!!
http://www.amazon.com

Get rational dude!
http://universist.meetup.com

[ Edited by: kahukini on 2003-10-25 01:21 ]

yeah, this is pretty cool. I've used it a few times now and I'm amazed ... you can even see the page SCANNED complete with illustrations on it, but it highlights the words on the page. Pretty cool.

Very interesting. Looks like you can't search on a phrase, which makes sense. I've been a heavy user of their restaurant menu scans, and I couldn't ever figure out why that was a service they wanted to provide, since I couldn't see any revenue in it. Now it all makes sense, it was the perfect way to try out this new technology. But jeez louise, even with the help of the publishers, it must have been quite an undertaking to get the scans in!

I've been successful searching for phrases... if your phrase doesn't exist though it comes up with an error

Get rational, save the planet, yada yada.
No, seriously.
http://universist.org

[ Edited by: kahukini on 2003-10-25 01:51 ]

I found it makes my searches harder because it brings up a ton of useless stuff to wade through.
Example: was searching for a book called "cufflinks" did a search on cufflinks and could not find the book. Ended up taking the author's name and it came right up so I know they had it.
You would think it would prioritize things a little better.

yeah, I bet the will add an advanced search feature where you can select what you want to search, titles, author, or text...

Save the planet with moral relativism, be a Universist!
http://universist.meetup.com

The OCR (optical character reconition) is not 100% perfect, either. I did a search for "googie" and came across a reference to "googIe.com" ... the OCR had mistaken the L in google.com for an uppercase I and encoded it as such.

Ah, technology.