Google Announces Large Influx of Public Domain Works into Google Print

Google has announced in their blog that they've added a bunch of public domain books to their Google Print project. How many? "A number." Oh, all right, if you're going to be that way about it...

Google Print's home is at http://print.google.com/ , while the advanced search is at http://print.google.com/advanced_print_search . Note here that you can search by author, by title, publisher, year of publication, and of course keyword. It doesn't appear that you can do a single date search to specify a range -- in other words, if you do a search for the newest date of 1975 in the date range, and don't specify an oldest date, Google Print will search for JUST the year 1975. However, searching for date:1975-0000 will find everything up to 1975, and date:1975-9999 will find everything after 1975.

One thing that is missing from the advanced search is the ability to specify the language of the results, and the way to do it with Web searching -- the &lr=lang_en switch -- doesn't appear to work. This was a little annoying, especially for the searches of the older books, as I found myself confronted with lots of results in languages I can't read.

Other than that the search was interesting. The date: syntax works as a standalone, so if you just want to do a survey of what was published a single year or range of years, you can do that. I found several authors including Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Marcus Tullius Cicero. Experimenting with words and date ranges was fun as well; intitle:engineers date:1800-1950 gets some really fun results, as does computer date:1800-1900 (though I'm not sure that Transnational Corporations: Transfer Pricing and Taxation was really published in 1900.)

I've been ragging on Google some for some of their implementations so let me say that viewing the books is really elegant. Click on a result and you'll be taken to the page of the book your search has found, with your keyword highlighted. From there you can page forward and backward through the book, and go to different points in the book including the copyright, front cover, and back cover. Links on the left direct you to finding the book at Alibris, ABE, or Froogle, and another link searches for the book in library holdings.

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