Jon Udell: Clash of the titans: Amazon vs. Google:
“Now Amazon lets you search the full text of its books. This is astounding, not only because of the further differences it highlights between Amazon and traditional bookstores, but because of the effort it must have taken to accomplish…
Jeff Bezos over at Amazon.com puts it this way:
Starting today, you can find books at Amazon.com based on every word inside them, not just matches to author or title keywords. Search Inside The Book — the name of this new feature — searches the complete inside text of more than 120,000 books — all 33 million pages of them… We’d love to hear about your experiences using Search Inside the Book. We’re running a contest where we’ll award our Grand Prize winner a Segway Human Transporter. Ten additional customers will each win a $100 Amazon.com gift certificate…
Back at the beginning of August, Seth Godin asked people to write in and share their ideas about What Google should do next. I wrote in thinking I would never make it into his resuting PDF. But, to my surprise , if you look on page 49 of the report you’ll find this:
I don’t know if this is possible, but it would be amazing if they pulled it off: Google Research Library. Google gets licenses for every e-book, full-text article, and electronic text available and makes them searchable. They of course wouldn’t make the full-text available, but they give their standard search result. With biographical information and link to Amazon (who would of course give them referral fees). If there is any complaint about Google, it would be that they are only as reliable as the content they are searching, and anyone can make a web page these days. So they offer highly reliable content searches. I don’t know. Just a thought. Thomas Knoll
I don’t know whether the guys over at google read my comments or not. But I thought it was pretty crazy to see the anouncement on the front page of Amazon the other day. And I realize that it’s not exactly the same idea I had, (Amazon did it instead of Google), but think of how much Amazon would have been shelling out to google if people were buy from Amazon through a Goolge search. I don’t know how much people get for being partners with Amazon, but it must be worth something or everyone wouldn’t be doing it. So Amazon beats Google to the punch, rolls out the technolgy themselves, and actually competes with google. Good idea, Amazon.
Anyway, I don’t expect Amazon to give me any credit for this, but if they want to give me a Segway or a $100 gift certificate I certainly wouldn’t complain.
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