Search inside the book with Amazon

Amazon.com adds full text search to its online bookstore, giving librarians, researchers and book lovers a new powerful search tool.

(October 25 2003) Resourceshelf reports that the online book-and-practically-everything-else-store Amazon.com has added book text search to its search engine.

"Search Inside the Book" gives you the opportunity to search the full-text of over 33 million book pages from over 120,000 titles.

"With the help of publishers, we're offering a completely new way for people to find the books they want," says Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com.

A book search for the term "search engine marketing" will as always bring up listings of books containing this keyword phrase in the title. However, Amazon.com will now also add books that include this term inside the book itself.

Hence today's results for "search engine marketing" includes books that is using synonyms of this term in the title ("search engine optimization") or that cover this topic in some chapters.

Books with the search query in the text will display an excerpt including that word or phrase and a link that says "See more references to 'search engine marketing' in this book."

By clicking on this link, searchers get a list of excerpts from all pages on which "search engine marketing" appears in the book. There is also a link to the book page on which the keyword phrase appears.

You can use any Amazon.com search box for searching. There is practically no support for advanced Boolean searching, although you may enclose phrases in quotation marks.

You need to be registered with Amazon.Com to access the full text of book pages, but you do not need to be a paying customer.

Amazon.com
Press release
Search inside the book (how it works)
Search inside the book FAQ

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