Saturday, July 08, 2006

Google Book Search Beta

Today I entered the search words "Shield of David" into http://books.google.com/ and got 1020 answers. I read 130 snippets, chose to open 20 links, and found after all this trouble 4 lines I needed and 2 pages that were "interesting" for further research. This was much less than I expected.

Conclusions:
o The bottom line - it was a waste of time. I could find more new data on a regular search engine
o This method of research brought me macro contents that included more paragraphs than I needed
o Snippets were misleading - promised good info but after opening the link they were not what I expected
o Most of the pages weren't relevant or their contents were already known to me
o 2-3 pages were technically in bad print quality and I couldn't read them
o Some interesting beginnings didn't allow me to see the next page
o I couldn't copy and paste

Maybe it is a good search engine for those who want to know which books are in their field of interest, or for getting introductory material, but for getting more info about something I already knew about it was disappointing!

1 comment:

zeevveez said...

Today I looked on Google Book Search for the search words:"Capernaum Synagogue dating" and got extraordinarily good results that I didn't get on the regular Google search.

It seems that Google Book Search is best at pinpointed unique queries. That's the best place to go when you know what you are looking for and want to refine your existing knowledge (not for colecting preliminary data).

Tip: I use Google Book Search to find pinpointed unique search words and feed them into the regular Google search in order to be able to copy and paste the hits.