Alexis Turner

Okay, Last Google Book Post

(google, hacks — )

6 Sep. 2007

Okay, I've become bored already with Google Books, but I did want to post this one last item detailing a pseudo-hack I found. Mainly for entertainment.

So, here's the hack:

Type ** as your search term (or any other number of special characters like ; or ! or %...but not ".", which seems to crash the application).

You get a number that I am assuming (though I could be totally wrong) is all the results in the database. As of this posting, 4.16pm PST, that would be 9,230,597 results. If you do the search just on "Full View," you get 2,790,143. They have, however, craftily limited you to something depressing like only 3 pages of results (try clicking on result page 10 to see what I mean). If you do a real search, you are not limited in this manner (even if the "real search" turns up 3,670,600 results, as for the word "man").

Nonetheless, an interesting peek into Google's mind. I'm curious as to what makes the first 30 results the first 30 results in the absence of keywords. Popularity? Downloads? Links in? They all seem like pretty bland classics (bland in the sense of "unimaginative" or "obvious"). They weren't digitized on similar dates, or by a particular institution. Also of note is that this hack doesn't work on the Google Web search, so it seems they are using a fairly different backend, not just a different database.

The ** trick turns up surprisingly similar results on the OCLC worldcat site - including the number of full results but the limited ability to access them. Given that Google also links to OCLC on individual book pages, I wonder if they aren't running off the same backend?