Posted by : Anonymous on Dec 25, 2003 - 08:00 AM General

Amazon.com's feature for searching within books, introduced in October, now has competition. Google,<b> the nation's leading search engine</b>, is testing a similar, unnamed service, introduced about two weeks ago with no publicity.
Susan Wojcicki, Google's director of product management, said the new service "fits very well within our mission: to organize all the world's information and to make it universally accessible and useful."

But Matthew Berk, research director at Jupiter Research in New York, said there is more to it.

"What you see here is a battle to be the 'front door' on the Internet," he said. "Where will people go first when they come to the Internet?"

When used with regular Google searches, the feature returns links to passages within books. It can also be used separately. For example, to see references within books to quilts, a visitor would type quilts site:print.google.com.

Unlike Amazon's feature, Google's won't allow viewing two pages before and two pages after the search term. Google's feature also prints a clear copy of the page containing the hit, unlike Amazon's, which prevents most copying.

Every page returned in a Google book search contains links to three online booksellers: Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com and Books-A-Million. It also contains ads.

But Google isn't collecting any money for the links or for the ads -- at least not yet -- and the service is free to publishers.

"If it proves valuable, they will monetize it," said Berk, the Jupiter analyst. "It's a tremendous opportunity to monetize it if consumers like it and the volume is high enough."

Google wouldn't say how many pages or books are now searchable, how many publishers are participating, or who they are.

Seattle's Amazon.com declined to comment on Google's new feature. Amazon's own offering, dubbed Search Inside the Book, included 120,000 searchable titles, from more than 190 publishers, when first introduced.

Within its first five days, the feature produced a 10 percent increase in sales averaged among the searchable titles, compared with the other books sold by Amazon

Amazon's feature quickly drew the ire of cookbook, travel guide and reference book authors, who complained that it would reduce sales because people could read and print big chunks of their works online.

Now, pages can't be printed when visitors use Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Netscape's Navigator browsers.

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