Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Microsoft's Book Search

Microsoft has a very nice implementation for its Book Search.

See here for some examples 'C Elegans and Mutations', or 'Girard and Scapegoats', and 'Quine and "semantic ascent"'

When you mouse over the individual titles in the search results the second panel shows information specific to the title: including a rule which shows the distribution of the search results within the title (the rule is imperial rather than metric, or maybe its binary: it has 32 segments). That must all come up on the fly. It is impressive what computing clouds can now do for us. Lorcan Dempsey, who notes this strong feature of the Microsoft presentation, calls this immediacy of information flow glanceability.

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