Looking for books as you want

this last week or two, as curious users can watch Russian search service on books from Google. However, the General public before the official announcement from Google itself remains in the dark. Meanwhile, already there is something to see and something to tell. Besides, Google has not gone unnoticed in Yandex, which last week began offering users with Store cards and the output presented there books. What, in turn, did not fail to say publicly.

Let's take a closer look at what is offered book lovers the giants of the search. Let's start with Google.

The California company offers us their traditional approach. Typing in the familiar search bar the title of the book, we get... well, what we will get, greatly depends on many factors. Mostly while where a book has been published. If it's a popular publication in the United States (as an example from reference service — exposing the social ills of America's best-selling book "Fast Food Nation"), then we will see a book card with an exhaustive (and slightly redundant) information on the book. If it is a product of the domestic publishing industry, today we are likely to see a card as in all respects a remarkable "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" the publisher of which just have not yet bothered to compile a book description for a service.

Generally work with the publishers is limited to obtaining their permission to publish excerpts from books (or books as a whole) and, in rare cases, images of book covers. The publication of some large ID indexed just because are in the archives of the libraries of foreign universities that participate in a special affiliate program, which in the search results very frequently refers to the names written in horrible transliteration.

Because of the modest size of the index are not displayed yet, and links to other variants of the edition of the book is similar to her work. Key words of the text, obviously, are selected by a fairly simple algorithm that selects the most high-frequency names and terms occurring in this book more often than "average". The result, however, turns disparate from human logic.

Not organized yet work with the Internet book shops you'll ever need — almost all of the books are encouraged to look only on the shelves of Western monsters like Amazon and Barnes&Noble, where they of course very often to be found. However, contextual advertising AdWords already smartly Unscrew for every page of the book, and quite relevant. This is especially noticeable for non-fiction books.

The publishing house "Mann, Ivanov and Ferber" — is one of the few people Google has started to operate. Commercial Director Artyom Stepanov told us that the benefits of collaboration for publishing is indirect: in theory, the improved recognition among the audience due to the fact that users search the books most often catch the eye. The revenue from advertising Google has not yet divided, and to find links to Runet shops closed and the direct conversion of ads into sales.

In General, looking at Western counterpart, it is possible to predict the service is quite successful future. Moreover, experts predict that by 2010 every tenth book in Russia will be sold through the Internet. Against this background, equipped with convenient search tools become really important.

However, the road to success in Russia, Google Books will have to compete with... Yes, with Yandex. Already working on Yandex.Store cards with descriptions of books searchable as author/title and a unique ISBN identifier, inferior to Google only the lack of ability to look in the text book. However, for annotations (to find the book without it I could not), links to several local stores, rating, reviews and in the end, the average price, you can make a fairly complete picture about almost any upcoming purchase. Besides, the database of indexed publications has already "hundreds of thousands" of items.

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru