Kokogiak Book Search

I was so excited in yesterday's post to find my name in someone else's book (I blow my own horn enough!) that I neglected to write about this interesting new KOKOGIAK - Book Search Mashup. The creator says:

I built this little app in response to a complaint in this blog post by Tim O'Reilly - that the various competing Book Search engines that let you search inside books (Google Books, Amazon Search Inside/A9 & MSN Live Book Search) are in proprietary bins. They require the searcher to either guess which website is most likely to house the results they want, or to try them one after the other.

Okay, well, it's easy enough to gather them all into one meta-page, so I did: http://kokogiak.com/booksearch/ - search all 3 at once.

It's been interesting to see the quantity/quality differences between the 3 in trying several searches. Results for "ajax", for instance - Amazon is all current programming books, Google is a mix of classic mythology and programming, and MSN is all classic mythology.

It may not solve the problem of making all the big boys play nice together and share their scanning efforts for the greater good, but it at least puts it all on the same page.

The actual search page is a little intimidating in its minimalism. When not performing vanity searches, I often use another fave, "Siamese cats", as a test topic. What a variance among results: A9 (Amazon) gave me all calendars; Google, all nonfiction, but at least they pertained to the subject; but the MSN LiveSearch results were weird beyond words, appearing to be mainly novels and only the first two dealt with cats.