It would be against their ToS I think (not positive about that. Worth investingating).
A thought I have had before is that a person could download let's say, the 10,000 most popular books and all college textbooks they could find, wire up slack and discord's search api for good channels you know of, and then index it, use bibliographies and references to other books as page rank, and use something like elasticsearch to query it. You would have built a search engine that probably felt like it was made out of magic.
I think the guy who wrote grep used it for a couple years before sharing it. I imagine it would be like that lol "how does that guy always find shit so fast!?"
The real bummer of that thought experiment is that Google actually tried to do that years back with Google books but was ultimately stopped by the publishing industry. Would have been pretty cool.
Edit: while writing this comment I couldn't remember the exact details of the lawsuit. I looked it up and it turns out I was wrong! Google actually won that lawsuit years later.
And yet when I hit play on my current audiobook and searched the next sentence I didn't get any results from Google or Google books. Maybe Google gave up on the project or it's just very slow going. In any case, it would appear there is actually a path for at least half of that idea.
I would image that it is indeed against their terms but when it comes to crawling it always feels like a grey area. Always "it depends".
Interesting idea!
For some reason it seems that books can be really tricky. With that said, Google does have a books API[1] that I played with in an earlier project.
I guess that explains why there haven't been any real competitors to Goodreads even people complain about how terrible is the service all over the internet.
Related to books, few days ago this app[2] was trending on HN which I thought was pretty cool.
Comments
It would be against their ToS I think (not positive about that. Worth investingating).
A thought I have had before is that a person could download let's say, the 10,000 most popular books and all college textbooks they could find, wire up slack and discord's search api for good channels you know of, and then index it, use bibliographies and references to other books as page rank, and use something like elasticsearch to query it. You would have built a search engine that probably felt like it was made out of magic.
I think the guy who wrote grep used it for a couple years before sharing it. I imagine it would be like that lol "how does that guy always find shit so fast!?"
The real bummer of that thought experiment is that Google actually tried to do that years back with Google books but was ultimately stopped by the publishing industry. Would have been pretty cool.
Edit: while writing this comment I couldn't remember the exact details of the lawsuit. I looked it up and it turns out I was wrong! Google actually won that lawsuit years later.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Googl....
And yet when I hit play on my current audiobook and searched the next sentence I didn't get any results from Google or Google books. Maybe Google gave up on the project or it's just very slow going. In any case, it would appear there is actually a path for at least half of that idea.
I would image that it is indeed against their terms but when it comes to crawling it always feels like a grey area. Always "it depends".
Interesting idea!
For some reason it seems that books can be really tricky. With that said, Google does have a books API[1] that I played with in an earlier project.
I guess that explains why there haven't been any real competitors to Goodreads even people complain about how terrible is the service all over the internet.
Related to books, few days ago this app[2] was trending on HN which I thought was pretty cool.
1 - https://developers.google.com/books
2 - https://hacker-recommended-books.vercel.app