Google Book Search: As Nimble As the La Brea Tar Pits?

November 17, 2005 by wfzimmerman | No comments

Official Google Blog: Judging Book Search by its cover:

What’s in a name? Quite a bit, actually; what you call yourself says a lot about what you think you are. And we’ve been thinking lately that Google Print should really be called Google Book Search.

Why the change? Well, one factor was all the comments we got about how excited people were that Google Print would help them print out their documents, or web pages they visit — which of course it won’t.

More important, the change reflects our product’s evolution. When we launched Google Print, our goal was to make it easier for users to discover books. Now that we’re starting to achieve that, we think a more descriptive name will help clarify what our users can do with it: namely, search the full text of books to find ones that interest them and learn where to buy or borrow them.

No, we don’t think that this new name will change what some folks think about this program. But we do believe it will help a lot of people understand better what we’re doing. We want to make all the world’s books discoverable and searchable online, and we hope this new name will help keep everyone focused on that important goal.

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I would be far happier about this sensible decision if the friendly folks at Google Book Search would finally digitize my four titles that have been in the import queue for almost a year. They seem as nimble as the La Brea Tar Pits. I am getting tired of the chirpy notes when they can’t do something basic like upload the completely digitized files that have been in their possession for months.

They report in an e-mail to publishers that Google Book Search will be promoted on the Google Home Page for “the next few days.” Great! That will make me money as I have observed that my Google Book Search ad revenues are directly proportional to total traffic.

Seems to me that Google needs to add more of the specialized searches like Blogs and Book Search to the basic home page. Why not a DHTML type gizmo that puts the most used search types at the front (far left) and rotates the unused ones to the “other” tab?

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