Let’s do the logical thing with on-line book searching? don’t think so

December 12, 2005 by wfzimmerman | No comments

Retailing, retail news, Times Online:

“HarperCollins will hire a technology company to help to digitise its current titles — it releases about 3,500 to 5,000 books a year worldwide — plus a further 20,000 to 30,000 backlist titles. The books would then be made available to search engines to index.”

“Brian Murray, the group president, said: “Google has been requesting physical copies of our books to make available for search. Amazon has followed and now both MSN and Yahoo! want to join in. That means there would be four sets of files out there — when it’s something the publisher should control.”

My guess: even though this makes logical sense, search engines will not use it. Why? Engineering culture. Simply put, this is not what Google is building.

If book search engines have to point at dozens or hundreds or thousands of publisher search engines, so much for performance and so much for economies of scale.

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