Sapping Attention: How badly is Google Books search broken, and why?
peter.suber's bookmarks 2019-02-11
Summary:
"I periodically write about Google Books here, so I thought I'd point out something that I've noticed recently that should be concerning to anyone accustomed to treating it as the largest collection of books: it appears that when you use a year constraint on book search, the search index has dramatically constricted to the point of being, essentially, broken....
What's going on? I don't know. I guess I blame the lawyers: I suspect that the reasons have to do with the way the Google books project has become a sort of Herculaneum-on-the-Web, frozen in time at the moment that anti-Books lawsuits erupted in earnest 11 years ago. The site is still littered with pre-2012 branding and icons, and the still-live "project history" page ends with the words "stay tuned..." after describing their annual activity for 2007...."