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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Google Print

I’m probably late to the party on this one, but I just noticed that Google Print results are now included in any Google search that starts with “books on”. I can’t say I like the lousy discoverability of the interface much—a search box at print.google.com would be a welcome addition—but the results are pretty impressive. It’s also a shame that they’re using a nasty obfuscation technique to disable copying and printing (based on serving book pages up as background images), if only because it will fuel yet more questions from newbie web developers asking how to do exactly that. Still, with today’s announcement that Google are to team up with five leading libraries to scan more books this service is going to get a whole lot more important over the next few years.

Posted 14th December 2004 at 3:44 pm

This is Google Print by Simon Willison, posted on 14th December 2004.

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9 comments

  1. Yeah, too bad that obsfuscation takes two seconds to get around in FF with the web dev tools.

    Cntrl-Shift-E, click, copy, paste.

    But yeah, a good basic preventention since it would stop anybody in IE from doing it quickly. A referrer check would be most effective.

    Jeff Minard - 14th December 2004 18:23 - #

  2. This looks similar to something I discovered a while ago: Google (catalogs) Search: xhtml css.

    Anne - 14th December 2004 19:36 - #

  3. If you're using Google's Desktop search, no 'within the book' results appear - it's over-ridden by the 'on your computer' results.

    Adam Bramwell - 14th December 2004 23:58 - #

  4. Google also supports this when searching for some author names. Try looking up e.g. "andrei zmievski" (without the quotes!) and you'll get a link to read his book on print.google.com.

    Martin Jansen - 15th December 2004 09:04 - #

  5. See also, NYTimes: Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database.

    Jeremy Dunck - 19th December 2004 04:25 - #

  6. I recently wondered how a PageRank like citation index would be a good measure to find books, see www.fr135.de/space/Citation+Index+for+Books.

    Christian Fries - 19th December 2004 16:14 - #

  7. Google print links dont appear if you aren't using google.com - which is a problem, as google.com now bumps you to your local google (in my case, google.co.uk)

    justin - 19th January 2005 12:07 - #

  8. Reply to Justin. Local google does not give google print links in Canada either, where google.com bumps to the local google (google.ca). When I type "google.com/search?q=" (without the quotes) into my browser, I get a google search engine that stays google.com and gives google print links.

    Carlos - 23rd January 2005 04:40 - #

  9. hi i need help xml, css. samples .pdf. file ok

    dhiren - 27th September 2005 16:05 - #

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