Dr. Peter Jacso, of the University of Hawaii, has a good analysis of the interruptions in logic of Google Book Search. Among others, the dear beast has trouble conforming to the Boolean OR operation: with keywords searches on arrogant OR arrogance producing more results than the combined number for each phrase alone. Some of these results, in his ongoing analysis of GBS stand, in bleak contrast to the sophistication of the main search engine. This is perhaps because Google is attempting to use its web index algorithms to retrieve the data, as Battelle suggests, against the grain of typical information retrieval and structured search systems. Perhaps these are bugs in designing that system?
Jasco also compares GBS to Amazon’s book search, with devastating results. Bottom-line:
“Beyond simple keyword searching, Google’s software seems to be cognitively challenged, to put it nicely, and hinders access to the content, which would deserve at least a functional and half as smart software as Amazon has.”
Gary Price, who always appreciates the proper acknowledgment that book digitization began before Google, has more.
Ah yes, the public is finally figuring out googs weekness…document to document matching. Short queries are fine, but once you get very large data (ie a book) the algo breaks down to a keyword matcher. Without the link popularity the algo is junk.
Who has a better solution? http://www.H5technologies.com
Their algo is build on human editors that have created a hierarchy of knowledge that performs great from you don’t need the smarts of links analysis on the web.
The word is “grok”. And it looks a lot more like a high-quality review than a Martian mind-meld.
I had a look at this H5 place, they don’t appear to offer search. Or anything at all apparently.