Google Book Search Gets Makeover

-- Publishers Weekly, 9/27/2007 7:32:00 AM

The homepage of Google’s Book Search has gotten a face-lift. In an attempt to make searching easier and more akin to browsing the shelves in a bricks-and-mortar bookstore, the search engine has added book jacket images to its search homepage and optimized the search capabilities of its technology. Now Web surfers will see books, chosen at random by Book Search algorithms and grouped under four different headings—Interesting, Classics, Highly Cited and Random Subject—on the Book Search homepage. The books will change every time the page is refreshed.

Additionally, links to various subcategories under the new headings have been added on a new navigation bar on the left. The new search options allow users to do keyword searches within narrower frames of reference, say, searching under the heading Russian literature, and narrowing with the keyword phrase “doomed heroine.”