New ways to search within a book

Thursday, July 02, 2009 at 3:58 PM

Posted by Casey Ho, Software Engineer

At Google we want to make it easy for you to find the information you need. As such, we've made searching for passages within a book part of the core experience of Google Books.

Earlier this month we revamped the search experience to make searching inside a book easier. You can now view the context of a search result, sort results by relevancy or page order, and flip through results quickly while viewing the book.

Today I'm excited to announce one more addition to the experience of searching a book: search results in your scrollbar. Now when you search in a book, little hints will appear in the margin to indicate where you results are located. When you hover over one of these annotations, you'll get a quick preview of the search results and the option of jumping directly to the associated page. Here I searched Aunt Mary's New England Cook Book for pie recipes:

Previously, it was difficult to get a feel for where results were located in a book. You could count the page numbers and make a guess, but that's hardly efficient. Now there is a strong visual display of result locations, and often clusters will form around particular chapters or passages. This will help you navigate more easily between pages which contain your search term.

These annotations will both make navigation between results quicker and help users jump to the correct result.

As always, feel free to provide feedback. Happy searching!