Amazon Launches Book Content Search

Posted By Hollis Thomases on Oct 28th, 2003

Amazon’s Search Inside the Book

Amazon.com today announced the launch of its latest innovation, Search Inside the Book. This is a new search service which lets customers find books by searching the full text inside them, not just matches to author or title keywords.
In collaboration with publishers, Amazon.com is enabling customers to find books at Amazon.com based on every word inside more than 120,000 books — more than 33 million pages of searchable text. Customers can also preview the inside text of these books. Search Inside the Book is integrated into Amazon.com’s standard search and includes books from all genres.

“Innovation drives customer experience, and Search Inside the Book is a great example,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO, Amazon.com. “With the help of publishers, we’re offering a completely new way for people to find the books they want.”

Through Search Inside the Book, customers can find, discover and buy titles from more than 190 publishers. Here’s how it works:

Customers interested in resistojet propulsion can search for “resistojet” and will automatically see a list of the many books at Amazon.com that contain this term in the text, in addition to those books that contain the term in the title.

Books with “resistojet” in the text will display an excerpt including that word or phrase and a link that says “See more references to ‘resistojet’ in this book.” By clicking on this link, customers will see a list of excerpts from all pages on which “resistojet” appears in the book they selected, as well as a link to view the full page from the book on which the excerpt appears.

Once customers have clicked on the link to a specific page and signed in with their Amazon.com user name and password, they can preview relevant pages, including the page they selected, and search for other terms of interest within the book.

Amazon made news in September with the announcement of the new A9 search technology being built by the company, which could become a competitor to Google and Yahoo. There are no confirmed reports if Amazon uses A9 for its Search Inside the Book technology.

According to the company, Udi Manber, a former Yahoo executive hired last year, will oversee the venture known as A9. The company will be based in Northern California and is moving quickly to hire as many as 30 employees in the backyards of search leaders Yahoo and Google.

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