A Search Engine That Finds You Weird Old Books | by Clive Thompson | Jan, 2022 | Debugger
peter.suber's bookmarks 2022-01-22
Summary:
"Still, sifting through old books can be a hassle. You have to go to those search sites and filter for the right vintage (and public-domain-status). It’s a pain.
So: I decided to partly automate this — by making my own search tool.
Behold the Weird Old Book Finder....
Behind the scenes, here’s what it’s doing, which is pretty simple: i) You type in a query, and ii) my app sends it to Google Books, and filters the results for pre-1927 public domain. Then iii) it picks one at random and displays it to you...."