Google Launches New Books Search Tool

This month Google launched a new search tool: Talk to Books. Whereas a typical Google search relies on keywords to produce results that attempt to respond in an appropriate in correct way to a query, Talk to Books looks at queries on a larger scale.

Using the sentence as a whole, Talk to Books delivers results that provide a response also on a sentence level. Take, for example, one of the samples suggested when playing around with the site: "What are some TV shows with strong female leads?"

Talk to Books attempts to answer that question by providing the user with books that may be helpful. This particular question produces many results, mostly pointing to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess as good options.

Fantasy Girls: Gender in the New Universe of Science Fiction and Fantasy Television, by Elyce Rae Helford, for example, includes the following passage, which Talk to Books delivers as a possible answer to the query:

In this context, popular media articles have compared Buffy to many other contemporary television shows, including Xena: Warrior Princess, Ally McBeal, and La Femme Nikita9 Buffy has received widespread popular praise for its positive representations of powerful females.

 It's a much more nuanced take on search than Google itself. Entering the same query produces results that skew heavily towards journalism, and that use the same language included in the query. For example, the first result is an article on POPSUGAR titled "TV Shows on Netflix With Strong Female Leads" (or "26 TV Shows You Can Watch on Netflix with Badass Women Front and Center" once you click to the page) by Sabienna Bowman. The article is a slideshow, and none of the TV shows included are Xena or Buffy.

You're likely to get good results for both search functions--it's Google, after all. But searching via Talk to Books provides users with a starting place for deeper research, and for a little bit more analysis and important context. The platform, in addition to being used for casual searching, could be helpful for slightly more thorough research that would provide the user with an interesting reading list.

Google, in its announcement for Talk to Books, made this an important point: "being well-known does not make a book sort to the top; this experiment looks only at how well the individual sentences match up. However, one benefit of this is that the tool may help people discover unexpected authors and titles, and surface books in a way that is fresh and innovative."

This could be a boon for the publishing industry, which has increasingly seen the success of the long tail as a result of the digitization of books and improvement of e-commerce suggestion functions. Stirring up interest in older, but helpful, books, could generate sales.

And that begs the question: When will Google monetize this?

Source: www.forbes.com