Amazon and OCR
Oct. 27th, 2003 06:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tahnanAmazon.com has now included full-text searching of books as part of its search engine.
This is a bad idea for a couple of reasons: one, if I'm searching for, I don't know, books edited by Will Shortz, I don't want something of David Sedaris's showing up on the list just because he mentions Shortz somewhere around page 200.
And second, because searching for a random string like "tqn" turns up such classic works as:
...well, you get the idea.
This is a bad idea for a couple of reasons: one, if I'm searching for, I don't know, books edited by Will Shortz, I don't want something of David Sedaris's showing up on the list just because he mentions Shortz somewhere around page 200.
And second, because searching for a random string like "tqn" turns up such classic works as:
- James Patterson's Along Came a Spider: ". . ñnnff®rr- mati®nn. She had nvifnnsed tt® talllk tt® tthe Burrrreaun, tQn®ungh. She°d graded w8tth me. tUyauni IIs in t11ne Anndes M®annnttainns, . . ."
- Tolkien's Book of Lost Tales: "". . . ^_ ~i~eVi,..a."^ltsw K'~Y~Rneaw• ¡ Cs..t ~.tae ~~ lá tí~•t, b,.+.1 c,tqN • CB..c &.K- tome .. ,SH tome saaw •,„,J + . . ."
...well, you get the idea.