A Quick Guide on the Google Book Search Update

If some of you can still remember, before the Search, Ads and Apps slogan, Google’s mostly known for its vision of “organizing the world’s information.” Google has barely scratched the surface of the vast information available in the digital realm, and yet there’s still the real world mountain of information to tackle. Google’s Book Search program is one effort by the company that aims to expand its reach in media that is not in the digital form (sure, there are tons of e-books available now, but this pales in comparison to the amount of information available in off-line, old-school real-world books).

In a recent update to the site, Google has opened up to all an updated version of Book search that has been tested on some Google users for some time now. The update highlights the company’s efforts to encourage its users to have a more focused experience in the website: to go beyond searching for books; but searching for specific contents found in these books. For the book authors and publishers, their works gain more exposure to readers and researchers; for Google, this means more opportunity for advertising targets.

On the main page of Google Book Search, the book front covers occupy most of the space. These books are categorized into the following: Interesting, Classics, Highly Cited, and a random subject. It’s arranged and presented in such a way that one will be encouraged to open a book right away.

Interesting section: Books withl topics or themes that will surely pique readers’ interests.

Classics section shows all the great old books.

Books which have the most citations from other books and literatures.

Random subject from Google’s book index.

On the left sidebar you see a list of different book subjects for fiction and non-fiction division. For example: Literature, Science fiction and Fantasy on the Fiction section, and Philosophy, Economics, Political Science on the Non-fiction section. Again there’s a list of random subjects at the bottom part of the sidebar.

This recent focus and efforts by Google on Book Search looks like it’s building up the service to become a stronger player in this particular area of search. After all, the competition is not laying low either.