Eugene Volokh comments on Amazon’s new search:
How quickly we take things for granted: Kevin Drum (CalPundit) praises amazon.com’s book search feature (“I am now willing to worship the ground that Jeff Bezos walks on”) but notes:
However, at the risk of seeming churlish about this gift from the gods, it turns out there are a couple of hiccups. First, Amazon has available only 120,000 books so far. This sounds like a lot, but when I started experimenting by typing in random titles from my bookshelf, it took me nearly a dozen tries to finally find one that was searchable. When they get up to a million books or so, it will probably be more useful.Yes, he’s right. Yes, he acknowledged that this is still a very cool feature. Yes, it’s my reaction, too.
But still, think about it: “Amazon has available only 120,000 books so far” for full-text searching. Only 120,000 books so far. Until 10 years ago, the Internet in its current form didn’t really exist. Until a few weeks ago, we couldn’t even search through one book in full text, unless it was one of the relatively few and generally quite old books (a few thousand, perhaps) available on some computer archives, which weren’t always the easiest things for people to track down, search, and read on the screen. Now we can search through bleeping 120,000 books. From our bleeping living rooms. For bleeping free. And we still complain (don’t blame Kevin, you know you thought that, too) that they haven’t gotten it up to a million books or so.
No wonder it’s so hard for humans to be happy.