The Pebble and the Avalanche

New Search Interface for Book

Amazon.com now offers a very interesting new search interface that's available for The Pebble and the Avalanche. There's a "concordance" of the 100 most common words in the book — the bigger the word in the graphical chart, the more often it's used in the book. Clicking on a word will show you every sentence in the book in which it appears, and if Amazon has authorized the page for viewing, you can bring that up, too. I have to admit that the search algorithm isn't too intelligent right now — no human would index the word another — but I think it's a terrific idea.

They've also finally gotten the "search inside" function up and running; you can see the covers, the table of contents, and other information. You can search for arbitrary words that appear in the book by using the (hard-to-notice) search box near the very top of the page.

Topics:  · technology

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