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Google Books removed all search functions for any books with previews
- mystraline 9mo agoThats easy. Check out library genesis, Anna's archive, and scihub for content. Piracy isnt theft if buying isnt ownership.
- adamnemecek 9mo agoNone of these does full text search.
- jszymborski 9mo agoAnd they are under constant threat by nation states. sci-hub hasn't seen new papers in ages.
- greenavocado 9mo agoBuild a local index
- adamnemecek 9mo agoMy problem is finding references I don't know about.
- droopyEyelids 9mo agozlibrary does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library
- adamnemecek 9mo agoHuh, the search is not amazing but it will have to do. Thanks! Are there others?
- teraflop 9mo agoThe Internet Archive supports full-text search on (AFAIK) its entire scanned book collection, even books that aren't available for borrowing.
- adamnemecek 9mo agoThis is actually pretty good.
- clueless 9mo agoI'd wonder if you'd ever consider putting up a downloadable mirror of their full-text search db?
- GorbachevyChase 9mo agoIronic those doing the most for making information open and accessible are the criminals.
- direwolf20 9mo agoOf course. When it's criminal to make information open and accessible, only criminals will make information open and accessible.
- al_borland 9mo agoA centuries old problem. Early translations of the Bible to English were illegal or required licenses. William Tyndale was put to death for translating the Bible into English, which would have been an act to make information open and accessible.
- josephcsible 9mo ago> William Tyndale was put to death for translating the Bible into English That's not what he was put to death for. See https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/tyndales-heresy https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/tyndales-her... and https://www.chinakasreflections.com/did-the-roman-catholic-church-kill-william-tyndale-just-because-he-translated-the-greek-bible-into-english-language/ https://www.chinakasreflections.com/did-the-roman-catholic-c...
- bijant 9mo agoSure, just like Aaron Swartz was persecuted for "recklessly damaging a protected computer" and "wire fraud" not for any other reasons at all and btw the State wasn't at all involved in murdering him, he did that to himself, probably because he felt guilty for having damaged so many computers....
- kevin42 9mo agoI’m genuinely curious how you feel about LLMs being trained on pirated material. Not being snarky here. Your comment reflects the old “information wants to be free” ideals that used to dominate places like HN, Slashdot, and Reddit. But since LLMs arrived, a lot of the loudest voices here argue the opposite position when it comes to training data. I’ve been trying to understand whether people have actually changed their views, or whether it’s mostly a shift in who is speaking up now.
- spongebobstoes 9mo agowhy would that change anything? copyright is still a tax on the whole of society for the benefit of rich people and corporations. it opposes innovation, evolution and progress maybe a short copyright would be fine (10 year fixed?) but copyright as-is seems indefensible to me
- mystraline 9mo ago> copyright is still a tax on the whole of society for the benefit of rich people and corporations. it opposes innovation, evolution and progress The original reason for copyright, patents, and trademarks made sense. We want people to create and share. And unlike the old guild solutions from Europe, copyright and patents were a tradeoff to encourage the arts and science. But what's a good tradeoff? Thats a big copyright question. 17 years? 34 years? Life of author? 75 years? How about individual non-commercial use? Or abandoned works? And patents aren't even in scope, but we see similar abuses against the raison d'etra of them. Patents were supposed to entail a full reproduction of invention. Now, its a game of how incomplete can we make the filing while still getting protection. Or worse yet, really dumb shit has been patented like 1 click or the XOR patent, or that asshole Chakrabarty who patented living organisms. There were good reasons for a fair copyright and patent law for furtherance of the art and sciences. That narrative was lost long ago. Now, only the violators can really push ahead. And they can't talk about it. (Trademark law has never really had much complaints, aside trademarking a color. If you buy from XYZ company, you want to buy from them, not a counterfeit. And it relates back to coats of arms, again, representing a family or a charge.)
- 9mo ago
- adamnemecek 9mo agoThe change happened on or around Jan 21. Overnight the results went from pretty good to absolute trash. Here are two screenshots taken on Jan 20 and Jan 23 https://bsky.app/profile/adamnemecek.bsky.social/post/3mdbup5axds2o https://bsky.app/profile/adamnemecek.bsky.social/post/3mdbup... They don't do full text search anymore esp for copyrighted books. I wonder if this is not a regression but an intent to give them a let up in the AI race.
- jeffbee 9mo agoIt isn't obvious why the left results are preferred over the right results.
- advisedwang 9mo agoThe left results are contemporary, the right are decades old. That includes editions of the same book --- surely the newer edition is going to be preferred by most readers.
- jeffbee 9mo agoI guess. That's not immediately clear to me. However, browsing around on Google Books suggests to me that it is the corpus which changed, not the algorithms.
- adamnemecek 9mo agoThe corpus is still the same, like searching the name of the book will find it, but the full text search.
- thaumasiotes 9mo ago> surely the newer edition is going to be preferred by most readers. Why? Where different editions exist, the reader will want to know which one they're getting, but they're unlikely to systematically prefer newer editions. But also, Google Books isn't aimed at "readers". You're not supposed to read books through it. It's aimed at searchers. Searchers are even less likely to prefer newer editions.
- al_borland 9mo agoIt might be time to update the mission statement. “Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” https://about.google/company-info/ https://about.google/company-info/
- zb3 9mo ago* for us, advertisers and our AI models
- ern_ave 9mo agoMy guess is that AI training is the main issue. Data that you can prove was generated by humans is now exceedingly valuable ...and most of that comes from the days before LLMs. The situation is a bit like how steel manufactured before the nuclear age is valuable.
- adamnemecek 9mo agoBut why would people train on excerpts from Google Books when whole books can be downloaded on libgen and such?
- asdefghyk 9mo agocopyright reasons?
- direwolf20 9mo agoBoth are a copyright violation
- londons_explore 9mo agoGoogle books is much bigger than libgen.
- tick_tock_tick 9mo agoWhy it's almost certainly not by choice.
- xorsula1 9mo agoMy guess is they detected being scraped and did this as preventive measure.
- breppp 9mo agomy guess is that the copyright landscape changed due to AI training, and these publishers won't let Google use that data anymore
- adamnemecek 9mo agoThe books are still there, it seems like the rankings have changed though.
- Andrex 9mo agoMy guess is they're cozier with publishers now than 20 years ago when they fought all the way to SCOTUS. "Hey, remove search?" "OK, it was costing money anyways."
- londons_explore 9mo agoIf search gives you a preview with a few surrounding words, it is fairly simple to abuse search with quotation marks to extract bigger and bigger sections of the books, potentially till you have the whole book.
- kingstnap 9mo agoMy guess: Text search and indexing is expensive. And you are getting some kind of AI vector search instead. Which tends to be kind of poop compared to true text search.
- storystarling 9mo agoI suspect it's actually the opposite. Standard inverted index text search is incredibly cheap and mature. Vector search requires generating embeddings and running approximate nearest neighbor queries, which is significantly more compute intensive than simple keyword matching. If they switched, it wasn't to save on compute costs.
- abetusk 9mo agoAnna's Archive [0]: > The largest truly open library in human history [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoTitle is: Google has seemingly entirely removed search functionality from most books on Google Books
- bryanrasmussen 9mo agoSince I pretty much only use Google Books for public domain books, old magazines, and newspapers I haven't noticed any problem with it. Maybe it's not as dead as this person thinks.
- adamnemecek 9mo agoNo the search results went from pretty good to absolute garbage https://bsky.app/profile/adamnemecek.bsky.social/post/3mdbup5axds2o https://bsky.app/profile/adamnemecek.bsky.social/post/3mdbup...
- mikestew 9mo agoThis was addressed in the post, I'm sure you just missed it when you read it: "But a few days ago they removed ALL search functions for any books with previews, which are disproportionately modern books." <emphasis mine>
- bryanrasmussen 9mo agoright, my point was just because what they use it for is now useless mine isn't and personally I think mine is more useful.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- mikestew 9mo agoFair enough, thanks for the clarification.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- pessimizer 9mo agoGoogle Books is long dead. If you click on the author's name in one of the results, it will search inauthor:"Author's Name" and this search will return garbage because it chokes on double quotes. This has been true for at least a couple of years; Google Books is not compatible with itself. Changing the double quotes to single quotes fixes it. Also, lately, when you filter only for books that have Full View some results that have Full View get dropped for no intelligible reason. Nobody is looking at it. I wouldn't be surprised if the preview search was switched off by accident. For me Books is only useful (and it is very useful) for books out of copyright, 100+ years old. Sometimes they aren't at archive.org. I hate Google, but I think it's a bit absurd to criticize them on this if somehow it's over AI. The only reason Google created Books may even have been AI, but they were hoping to have the books open to everyone, and the publishers and authors whose full text is being blocked are literally the people who stopped it from happening. Maybe they spoke up about AI, too. I find it even hard to even criticize that Google doesn't take care of Books - it has no purpose or profit potential for them anymore, it's obviously charity that they don't take it down completely.
- didip 9mo agoGoogle Books could have been a subscription service ala Netflix. Then it would have been hella useful.
- crazygringo 9mo agoRemember that preview functionality is granted by contract with the publishers. Which is why some books have it and some books don't. Almost certainly, this is something that publishers requested the removal of, under threat of requiring previews to be removed entirely. Books that are out of copyright still have full search and display enabled. So blame publishers, not Google.
- adamnemecek 9mo agoThe previews are still there though, they just don't rank.
- crazygringo 9mo agoRight, that's what I'm saying. For whatever reason it seems publishers decided they don't want their preview-only books as part of the full-text search across all books. If they decide that, Google has to comply. This isn't like web search where web pages are publicly available and so Google can return search results across whatever it wants. For books, it relies on publisher cooperation to both supply book contents for indexing under license and give permissions for preview. If publishers say to turn off search, Google turns off search.
- tamarinddreams 9mo agoGiven the argument over LLMs consuming books illegally, I think publishers could be a little concerned that an LLM that combined partial previews on every modern work on a subject might be a destroyer of the market for the average book on the subject with the license to do so having been properly granted via this feature.
- abetusk 9mo agoI will blame overlong copyright term lengths. 70 years after authors death or 95 years after publication, allowing most recent work to enter the commons effectively after a century, or more, from now [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#/media/File:Extended_Tom_Bell's_graph_showing_extension_of_U.S._copyright_term_over_time.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
- pfdietz 9mo agoSo, if you search for some text that occurs at the end of one chunk, will it then preview a following chunk? And could chaining these chunks give you the entire book? If so, I could see someone doing this to exfiltrate books.
- crazygringo 9mo agoYou're talking about in-book search (TFA is about search across all books), and yes that was indeed once a known technique for extracting whole or nearly whole books. That's why publishers responded by excluding sections of books from search (it will list the pages but you can't view them), and individual Google accounts became limited in how many extra pages they were ever allowed to see of an individual book beyond the standard preview pages. But then LibGen, Z-lib, and Anna's Archive became popular and built up their collections...
- Zathman 9mo agoI just checked and yes, search inside of books with previews is still possible. (a) when you search books.google.com and find a book with a preview, it opens their new book viewer - the search is at the bottom of the page. You can also click "View All" to see all references of your search in that book. (b) if you go to the book homepage (clicking X in the top right of the book viewer if that opened), there's still a "Search Inside Book" next to the "Preview" button under the title.
- adamnemecek 9mo agoBut you have to know what book you are looking for.
- Terr_ 9mo agoAmong the less-important things I'd like to send back in time to my past-self: "The trend in digitized book passages will reverse, and they will become harder and harder to find with time, so clip your own copies of everything you like to quote."
- damnitbuilds 9mo agoDone to satisfy the copyright barons. Protest this by pirating, until copyright terms are reduced to make copyright once again a net benefit for society.
- btrettel 9mo agoPresumably these books can still be searched via HathiTrust: https://www.hathitrust.org/ https://www.hathitrust.org/ More on the HathiTrust project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust Though I don't know how many of the HathiTrust books are the "preview" kind the Reddit post mentions. Maybe none are?
- lr0 9mo agoAnna's Archive or any piracy of book does not replace Google Books search functions at all. The search functions of these website just looks inside the PDF text, Google Books helped me many time to find manuscripts or old books that were not OCR'd properly. It's really a big loss.
- caplane 9mo agoIt's working again! Must have been a glitch. Very relieved to have it back!
- bulge 8mo ago[dead]