Searching for printed material using Google

Google has included the text of some printed material in its database. But how do you find the text of these books and articles, and are there any good alternatives?

By Lars Våge

(October 4 2004) There has been some mention of Google's initiative to index printed material -- Google Print.

Part of this material is excerpts from books, another part is articles in full text or abstracts of articles that are linked to web sites where the full text can be found and read (although not always for free).

There has been some complaints that it is difficult to get hits from this material with a regular Google search.

Tara Calishain at Researchbuzz recently made a search box available from one of her blog entries that lets you search specifically in this index.

Alternatively you may use the following operators in Google:

To search for book excerpts:
searchterm site:print.google.com inurl:isbn

To search for article excerpts or full text articles:
searchterm site:print.google.com inurl:articleid

To search for any printed material:
searchterm site:print.google.com inurl:isbn | inurl:articleid (this one does probably give incorrect results)

If you do not want to use the | character, OR will function in the same way. The | or OR operators only affect the words immediately behind them or in front of them.

How much printed material is indexed by Google? Well, if you do the search at the bottom of the list above and leave out any search term, you get 47,200 hits.

If you do the two searches at the top of the list, you get 39,100 book excerpts and 28,700 articles. (This is why I find Google's OR operator to be a bit unreliable.)

Considering how tiny Google's index of printed material is, I find it not that interesting at the moment. For book searches Amazon is incomparably much better, especially when using their new A9 search service. Here you can search and partially read the full text of over 100,000 books.

If you are interested in articles, I suggest Looksmart's findarticles which offers 5,5 million free articles in full text.

If you happen to walk by a library (especially an academic one), you could take advantage of the fact that they usually have access to a big number of paid for databases with full text articles from their public computers. [Some libraries in some countries may also allow users with library cards access to web versions of these databases; the Editor]

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