Search for the holy grail: More developments on news about Google print search I blogged earlier this week: It’s in beta (if you get the message “page left intentionally blank,” well, that’s why they call it beta, I assume). But, before you get too impressed, it’s not a parity product with Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” feature. In comparison to Amazon, it’s lame. Indeed, it appears to me to simply be a search of a database of bibliographic descriptions and extended material that Google may be be syndicating from Ingram Book Company. It is not even remotely close to what Amazon has created. It’s very unusual for Google to do something so underwhelming.

Quote (from Search Engine Watch):

Google Print differs from Amazon’s recently introduced Search Inside the Book program, which makes the full text of books available online to readers. By contrast, Google is indexing only a small excerpt from each book, typically taken from the inside cover, jacket reviews, author biographies or the book’s introduction.

Articles:

Search Engine Watch: “Google Introduces Book Searches” (Best article, with links to sample searches)
Wall Street Journal (paid subscription): “Can’t Find a Book Excerpt? Google It”
NYT: “Google Experiment Provides Internet With Book Excerpts” (registration required)
CNET’s News.com: “Google tests book search”

(via PaidContent.org)

Christmas wishlist, 2004: The NY Times reported today that Intel is expected to announce in early January a new chip that will drastically lower the cost of HDTV, for example a 50″ plasma, 7″ thick for $1,000 by a year from now. Yesterday, the WSJ reported on a Chinese company making low-cost plasma TVs for their domestic market that is being approached by Dell and H-P for a U.S. market product. Admit it. It’s a great time to be alive.

Prison industries: AP is reporting that three Texas prisoners bilked hundreds of newspapers and magazines out of more than $8,000, by demanding that the publications give them refunds for subscriptions they never had.

Quote:

Texas prison officials said William Woods, 33, and fellow prisoners Jerry Dale Walker, 38, and Leighton Smith, 31, hatched the scam after getting their hands on a $375 newspaper directory. The French Robertson Unit inmates used the directory to get subscription information and addresses to send letters to the newspapers. In the letters, they would say they had not received their newspapers and request their money back.

Over 400 publications were scammed. Most sent refunds to the prisoners without doing research. What? Don’t most publications at least have a means to do a simple query of a database? If a person’s name or address is not in the circulation database, why would a check be issued?

The article details the fascinating scam.

Happy holidays, Kurt Andersen: There appears to be much to celebrate this season around the Andersen home. Recently, I blogged the news of his new super-titled (”editorial director and chairman”) job for the Benetton customer magazine, Colors. Today, Keith Kelly reports that Kurt, along with the other three founders of Spy Magazine, have signed a reported $1 million book deal with Miramax for a title to be published in 2005, “Spy: The Funny Years.”