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Google Books removed all search functions for any books with previews

222 points by adamnemecek

by abetusk

2 subcomments

Anna's Archive [0]:
> The largest truly open library in human history
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive

by al_borland

2 subcomments

It might be time to update the mission statement.
“Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”
https://about.google/company-info/

by crazygringo

3 subcomments

Remember that preview functionality is granted by contract with the publishers. Which is why some books have it and some books don't.
Almost certainly, this is something that publishers requested the removal of, under threat of requiring previews to be removed entirely.
Books that are out of copyright still have full search and display enabled.
So blame publishers, not Google.

by Terr_

0 subcomment

Among the less-important things I'd like to send back in time to my past-self:
"The trend in digitized book passages will reverse, and they will become harder and harder to find with time, so clip your own copies of everything you like to quote."

by mystraline

3 subcomments

Thats easy.
Check out library genesis, Anna's archive, and scihub for content.
Piracy isnt theft if buying isnt ownership.

by Zathman

1 subcomments

I just checked and yes, search inside of books with previews is still possible.
(a) when you search books.google.com and find a book with a preview, it opens their new book viewer - the search is at the bottom of the page. You can also click "View All" to see all references of your search in that book.
(b) if you go to the book homepage (clicking X in the top right of the book viewer if that opened), there's still a "Search Inside Book" next to the "Preview" button under the title.

by lr0

0 subcomment

Anna's Archive or any piracy of book does not replace Google Books search functions at all. The search functions of these website just looks inside the PDF text, Google Books helped me many time to find manuscripts or old books that were not OCR'd properly. It's really a big loss.

by didip

0 subcomment

Google Books could have been a subscription service ala Netflix.
Then it would have been hella useful.

by btrettel

0 subcomment

Presumably these books can still be searched via HathiTrust: https://www.hathitrust.org/
More on the HathiTrust project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust
Though I don't know how many of the HathiTrust books are the "preview" kind the Reddit post mentions. Maybe none are?

by pfdietz

1 subcomments

So, if you search for some text that occurs at the end of one chunk, will it then preview a following chunk? And could chaining these chunks give you the entire book?
If so, I could see someone doing this to exfiltrate books.

by xorsula1

3 subcomments

My guess is they detected being scraped and did this as preventive measure.

by adamnemecek

2 subcomments

The change happened on or around Jan 21. Overnight the results went from pretty good to absolute trash.
Here are two screenshots taken on Jan 20 and Jan 23 https://bsky.app/profile/adamnemecek.bsky.social/post/3mdbup...
They don't do full text search anymore esp for copyrighted books. I wonder if this is not a regression but an intent to give them a let up in the AI race.

by bryanrasmussen

2 subcomments

Since I pretty much only use Google Books for public domain books, old magazines, and newspapers I haven't noticed any problem with it. Maybe it's not as dead as this person thinks.

by caplane

0 subcomment

It's working again! Must have been a glitch. Very relieved to have it back!

by damnitbuilds

0 subcomment

Done to satisfy the copyright barons.
Protest this by pirating, until copyright terms are reduced to make copyright once again a net benefit for society.

by ChrisArchitect

0 subcomment

Title is: Google has seemingly entirely removed search functionality from most books on Google Books

by pessimizer

0 subcomment

Google Books is long dead. If you click on the author's name in one of the results, it will search inauthor:"Author's Name" and this search will return garbage because it chokes on double quotes. This has been true for at least a couple of years; Google Books is not compatible with itself. Changing the double quotes to single quotes fixes it. Also, lately, when you filter only for books that have Full View some results that have Full View get dropped for no intelligible reason.
Nobody is looking at it. I wouldn't be surprised if the preview search was switched off by accident.
For me Books is only useful (and it is very useful) for books out of copyright, 100+ years old. Sometimes they aren't at archive.org.
I hate Google, but I think it's a bit absurd to criticize them on this if somehow it's over AI. The only reason Google created Books may even have been AI, but they were hoping to have the books open to everyone, and the publishers and authors whose full text is being blocked are literally the people who stopped it from happening. Maybe they spoke up about AI, too. I find it even hard to even criticize that Google doesn't take care of Books - it has no purpose or profit potential for them anymore, it's obviously charity that they don't take it down completely.

0 subcomment

by kingstnap

1 subcomments

My guess: Text search and indexing is expensive. And you are getting some kind of AI vector search instead.
Which tends to be kind of poop compared to true text search.