You probably know by now that Amazon has released the first of its A9 search offerings: Search Inside the Book. (If you don't, basically when you search on Amazon it searches the full text of thousands of books, and points you not only to the book, but to scanned copies of all the pages that match your search.)
So what should Google do? This is a perfect time to cut a deal with Amazon: Amazon lets them index the text of all these books, and in return, Google sends tons of customers to Amazon's door. Putting the books in the search results wouldn't be any different than the search results already provided by Amazon, so there wouldn't be any copyright or lost-sales problems.
Despite the amazingness of the Web, there's still some stuff you can find only in books. Google wouldn't be living up to their mission (to organize all the world's information) if they passed up this amazing opportunity.
Posted by Aaron Swartz on October 30, 2003 07:05 AM