Google® Power Tools Bible

Chapter 6. Searching through Books

<feature><title>In This Chapter</title>

• Find books using Google Book Search

• Use the Advanced Search features to focus your book search

• Discover detailed information about books that interest you

• Read entire books in the public domain

• Librarians learn to use Google Book Search in your library

• Learn about the Google Books Partner Program

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It may seem unusual that one of Google’s key search areas is for books, one of its few non-digital-oriented search technologies. It’s going to be a very long time before we see the end of paper books. Google’s Book search allows you to discover books that you’d like to purchase or obtain. Once you “discover” a book you can buy it online, or use Google’s library catalog system discussed later in this chapter.

It was actually the Google Book project that formed the foundation of Google in the very beginning. While creating software to help index digitized books while working as researchers on the Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created a crawler named BackRub. It was the work they did on BackRub that formed the foundation of Google’s PageRank system, the core of the Google search technology.

Google Book Search is NOT a bookstore, and Google does not make money if you purchase books through its search pages. This is important to know so that you can be assured that the search results you view are not biased to allow for greater book sales. You may find contextual ...