Amazon Launches Powerful Digital Database

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Amazon Launches Powerful Digital Database

Sat Oct 25,10:30 AM ET  Add Technology - AP to My Yahoo! 

By HELEN JUNG, AP Business Writer

 

SEATTLE - Giving people a powerful new tool for locating books on its Web site, Amazon.com has built a digital database that lets users search for words and phrases in a text, not just the title or author.

 

The Internet retailer says the new feature, besides creating a reference library of sorts, will help customers find books they didn't even know existed. The database already includes some 33 million pages from more than 120,000 books.

Although it's limited to books on Amazon's site, the new search function edges the Seattle company nearer to what Google does. Its real promise lies in its potential for the multibillion-dollar business of search-related advertising on the Internet, said Tim Hickernell, a vice president for Meta Group.

Amazon.com obtained permission from about 190 publishers including Random House and Simon and Schuster. Users can enter queries such as "Holden Caulfield" and get a list of books that mention the famous character from J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye."

Amazon has long offered a search engine on its Web site to help users navigate through its inventory of electronics, videos, compact discs and other products for sale.

But the text-searching feature, introduced Thursday, deepens Amazon's ability to connect customers with books they might not have known about.

Building upon the existing "Look Inside the Book" feature in which users have been able to electronically browse several pages of a given book, the new feature is called "Search Inside the Book."

To satisfy publishers wary of making too much content available for free online, Amazon.com is limiting how much of a book users can view, said Kristin Schaefer, an Amazon spokeswoman.

Amazon vice president Steve Kessel declined to specify how the technology determines the relevance of the search results to users and how much money the company has invested in developing its search software.

A spokeswoman for Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com's chief online competitor in book sales, did not return a message about whether its Internet division plans to add similar technology.

In a way, the move helps Amazon resemble a brick-and-mortar store where readers can thumb through books to find what they're looking for, Hickernell said. It will be interesting to see whether and how Amazon expands the use of the technology, he said, such as using it to catalog music lyrics or movie scripts.

In addition, the ability to search specific terms and phrases within books' text — as opposed to the more general book categories — gives Amazon.com greater insight into what exactly users are looking for. With that greater degree of precision, Amazon.com could more accurately link search results to product listings and advertisements.

Advertising, in fact, has made the search business worth billions of dollars a year, encouraging companies like Microsoft's MSN division to invest heavily in their own search engines.

"Even though (Amazon.com is) not a search company or a portal company, if they had that kind of capability on content, they could be looked at as a substitute product for Google and Yahoo," Hickernell said.

In fact, Amazon has already established a subsidiary, Palo Alto, Calif.-based A9, which is focusing on e-commerce searches.

 

Whether A9 emerges as a competitor to Google or others in searching the Internet is up for debate, said Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Watch newsletter.

However, Amazon already has an important weapon in its arsenal — its ability, long used, to analyze customers' past purchases to offer suggestions for other products they might want.

 

"That kind of technological capability could be useful in Web search," Sullivan said.