Google Books removed all search functions for any books with previews

https://old.reddit.com/r/google/comments/1qn1hk1/google_has_seemingly_entirely_removed_search/

by adamnemecek • 6 months ago

225 74 6 months ago

old.reddit.com

adamnemecek11• 6 months ago

The change happened on or around Jan 21. Overnight the results went from pretty good to absolute trash.

Here are two screenshots taken on Jan 20 and Jan 23 https://bsky.app/profile/adamnemecek.bsky.social/post/3mdbup...

They don't do full text search anymore esp for copyrighted books. I wonder if this is not a regression but an intent to give them a let up in the AI race.

jeffbee2• 6 months ago

It isn't obvious why the left results are preferred over the right results.

advisedwang• 6 months ago

The left results are contemporary, the right are decades old. That includes editions of the same book --- surely the newer edition is going to be preferred by most readers.

toephu2• 6 months ago

Yup, it's for AI.

Similarly, a year ago or so ChatGPT could summarize YouTube videos. Google put a stop to that so now only Gemini can summarize YouTube videos.

AJ007• 6 months ago

The YT transcripts are linked to on the YT page itself. If they remove that, it is trivial to use a local STT model to transcribe the video. If they make it impossible to download a video, you could just have a microphone record all of the sound, and so on. Once you have the transcription of anything, summarizing is trivial. I have a local script that does this and I use it all of the time. Also produce diagrams for YT summaries. Hours saved, per day.

mystraline3• 6 months ago

Thats easy.

Check out library genesis, Anna's archive, and scihub for content.

Piracy isnt theft if buying isnt ownership.

adamnemecek11• 6 months ago

None of these does full text search.

jszymborski• 6 months ago

And they are under constant threat by nation states. sci-hub hasn't seen new papers in ages.

greenavocado• 6 months ago

Build a local index

droopyEyelids• 6 months ago

zlibrary does

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library

GorbachevyChase• 6 months ago

Ironic those doing the most for making information open and accessible are the criminals.

direwolf202• 6 months ago

Of course. When it's criminal to make information open and accessible, only criminals will make information open and accessible.

al_borland2• 6 months ago

A centuries old problem. Early translations of the Bible to English were illegal or required licenses.

William Tyndale was put to death for translating the Bible into English, which would have been an act to make information open and accessible.

kevin42• 6 months ago

I’m genuinely curious how you feel about LLMs being trained on pirated material. Not being snarky here.

Your comment reflects the old “information wants to be free” ideals that used to dominate places like HN, Slashdot, and Reddit. But since LLMs arrived, a lot of the loudest voices here argue the opposite position when it comes to training data.

I’ve been trying to understand whether people have actually changed their views, or whether it’s mostly a shift in who is speaking up now.

spongebobstoes• 6 months ago

why would that change anything? copyright is still a tax on the whole of society for the benefit of rich people and corporations. it opposes innovation, evolution and progress

maybe a short copyright would be fine (10 year fixed?) but copyright as-is seems indefensible to me

gbear605• 6 months ago

Personally, I'd like for copyright to be abolished, and then for LLM training to be made illegal for reasons entirely unrelated to copyright.

mystraline3• 6 months ago

Personally, my opinion doesnt matter. I'm a nobody who doesnt work in AI fields.

But as a pirate, I specialize in finding hidden, hard to find, or otherwise lost sources. They're not making anybody any money, and I absolutely do not sell anything thats not mine (freely given).

But having every commercial work available for ingestion into an LLM is an amazing way to train an AI. However if you're going to use piracy at scale to train, you should also not be able to sell the LLM or access to it.

And yeah, that wrecks every corporate LLM strategy. Boo fucking hoo.

Do creators need paid for content they create? Ideally, yes! Do they deserve iron-fisted control of your hardware (DRM) to enact their demands? Fuck no!

Ideally, the LLMs would be FLOSS, full weights published, lists of content used to reproduce, etc. We could prune bad content and add more good. But the problem again is whoever does this must violate copyright cause copyright in the way its implemented is terrible.

In reality, I like the RIAA's congressional solution. You send a check for how many plays you did to BMI/ASCAP and you're good. That could be extended to books and shows. If that were done, you could have a New-Flix service that literally has every show and movie in existence. You just pay a reasonable cost per month to access the whole of video humanity.

Alas. Guess I'll have to build it myself.

al_borland2• 6 months ago

It might be time to update the mission statement.

“Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”

https://about.google/company-info/

zb3• 6 months ago

* for us, advertisers and our AI models

ern_ave• 6 months ago

My guess is that AI training is the main issue.

Data that you can prove was generated by humans is now exceedingly valuable ...and most of that comes from the days before LLMs. The situation is a bit like how steel manufactured before the nuclear age is valuable.

tick_tock_tick• 6 months ago

Why it's almost certainly not by choice.

xorsula1• 6 months ago

My guess is they detected being scraped and did this as preventive measure.

breppp• 6 months ago

my guess is that the copyright landscape changed due to AI training, and these publishers won't let Google use that data anymore

adamnemecek11• 6 months ago

The books are still there, it seems like the rankings have changed though.

Andrex• 6 months ago

My guess is they're cozier with publishers now than 20 years ago when they fought all the way to SCOTUS.

"Hey, remove search?"

"OK, it was costing money anyways."

londons_explore2• 6 months ago

If search gives you a preview with a few surrounding words, it is fairly simple to abuse search with quotation marks to extract bigger and bigger sections of the books, potentially till you have the whole book.

kingstnap• 6 months ago

My guess: Text search and indexing is expensive. And you are getting some kind of AI vector search instead.

Which tends to be kind of poop compared to true text search.

storystarling• 6 months ago

I suspect it's actually the opposite. Standard inverted index text search is incredibly cheap and mature. Vector search requires generating embeddings and running approximate nearest neighbor queries, which is significantly more compute intensive than simple keyword matching. If they switched, it wasn't to save on compute costs.

abetusk2• 6 months ago

Anna's Archive [0]:

The largest truly open library in human history

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive

cft• 6 months ago

Mirrors https://open-slum.org/

belter• 6 months ago

How funny. They have a DMCA Takedown Requests link...

bigwheels• 6 months ago

Open-slum currently experiencing heavy traffic, but here's an additional mirror: https://open-slum.pages.dev/

ChrisArchitect• 6 months ago

Title is: Google has seemingly entirely removed search functionality from most books on Google Books

bryanrasmussen2• 6 months ago

Since I pretty much only use Google Books for public domain books, old magazines, and newspapers I haven't noticed any problem with it. Maybe it's not as dead as this person thinks.

adamnemecek11• 6 months ago

No the search results went from pretty good to absolute garbage https://bsky.app/profile/adamnemecek.bsky.social/post/3mdbup...

mikestew2• 6 months ago

This was addressed in the post, I'm sure you just missed it when you read it:

"But a few days ago they removed ALL search functions for any books with previews, which are disproportionately modern books." <emphasis mine>

bryanrasmussen2• 6 months ago

right, my point was just because what they use it for is now useless mine isn't and personally I think mine is more useful.

pessimizer• 6 months ago

Google Books is long dead. If you click on the author's name in one of the results, it will search inauthor:"Author's Name" and this search will return garbage because it chokes on double quotes. This has been true for at least a couple of years; Google Books is not compatible with itself. Changing the double quotes to single quotes fixes it. Also, lately, when you filter only for books that have Full View some results that have Full View get dropped for no intelligible reason.

Nobody is looking at it. I wouldn't be surprised if the preview search was switched off by accident.

For me Books is only useful (and it is very useful) for books out of copyright, 100+ years old. Sometimes they aren't at archive.org.

I hate Google, but I think it's a bit absurd to criticize them on this if somehow it's over AI. The only reason Google created Books may even have been AI, but they were hoping to have the books open to everyone, and the publishers and authors whose full text is being blocked are literally the people who stopped it from happening. Maybe they spoke up about AI, too. I find it even hard to even criticize that Google doesn't take care of Books - it has no purpose or profit potential for them anymore, it's obviously charity that they don't take it down completely.

didip• 6 months ago

Google Books could have been a subscription service ala Netflix.

Then it would have been hella useful.

crazygringo3• 6 months ago

Remember that preview functionality is granted by contract with the publishers. Which is why some books have it and some books don't.

Almost certainly, this is something that publishers requested the removal of, under threat of requiring previews to be removed entirely.

Books that are out of copyright still have full search and display enabled.

So blame publishers, not Google.

adamnemecek11• 6 months ago

The previews are still there though, they just don't rank.

crazygringo3• 6 months ago

Right, that's what I'm saying. For whatever reason it seems publishers decided they don't want their preview-only books as part of the full-text search across all books. If they decide that, Google has to comply.

This isn't like web search where web pages are publicly available and so Google can return search results across whatever it wants. For books, it relies on publisher cooperation to both supply book contents for indexing under license and give permissions for preview. If publishers say to turn off search, Google turns off search.

tamarinddreams• 6 months ago

Given the argument over LLMs consuming books illegally, I think publishers could be a little concerned that an LLM that combined partial previews on every modern work on a subject might be a destroyer of the market for the average book on the subject with the license to do so having been properly granted via this feature.

abetusk2• 6 months ago

I will blame overlong copyright term lengths. 70 years after authors death or 95 years after publication, allowing most recent work to enter the commons effectively after a century, or more, from now [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...

Analemma_• 6 months ago

This is the rare case when Europe is even worse. Metropolis, the 1927 Fritz Lang film, is out of copyright in the United States but will still be in copyright in Germany until 2047: 120 fucking years.

It’s preposterous, and offensive to anyone’s intelligence to claim that this is about incentivizing production; does anyone seriously believe there is a potential artist out there who would avoid making their magnum opus if it could only be under copyright for 119 years?

pfdietz• 6 months ago

So, if you search for some text that occurs at the end of one chunk, will it then preview a following chunk? And could chaining these chunks give you the entire book?

If so, I could see someone doing this to exfiltrate books.

crazygringo3• 6 months ago

You're talking about in-book search (TFA is about search across all books), and yes that was indeed once a known technique for extracting whole or nearly whole books.

That's why publishers responded by excluding sections of books from search (it will list the pages but you can't view them), and individual Google accounts became limited in how many extra pages they were ever allowed to see of an individual book beyond the standard preview pages.

But then LibGen, Z-lib, and Anna's Archive became popular and built up their collections...

Zathman• 6 months ago

I just checked and yes, search inside of books with previews is still possible.

(a) when you search books.google.com and find a book with a preview, it opens their new book viewer - the search is at the bottom of the page. You can also click "View All" to see all references of your search in that book.

(b) if you go to the book homepage (clicking X in the top right of the book viewer if that opened), there's still a "Search Inside Book" next to the "Preview" button under the title.

adamnemecek11• 6 months ago

But you have to know what book you are looking for.

Terr_• 6 months ago

Among the less-important things I'd like to send back in time to my past-self:

"The trend in digitized book passages will reverse, and they will become harder and harder to find with time, so clip your own copies of everything you like to quote."

damnitbuilds• 6 months ago

Done to satisfy the copyright barons.

Protest this by pirating, until copyright terms are reduced to make copyright once again a net benefit for society.

btrettel• 6 months ago

Presumably these books can still be searched via HathiTrust: https://www.hathitrust.org/

More on the HathiTrust project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust

Though I don't know how many of the HathiTrust books are the "preview" kind the Reddit post mentions. Maybe none are?

lr0• 6 months ago

Anna's Archive or any piracy of book does not replace Google Books search functions at all. The search functions of these website just looks inside the PDF text, Google Books helped me many time to find manuscripts or old books that were not OCR'd properly. It's really a big loss.

caplane• 6 months ago

It's working again! Must have been a glitch. Very relieved to have it back!

Google Books removed all search functions for any books with previews

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