Google book search
Flexing their traffic muscle, Google today started including book search results at the top of search (at least on my computer.) Here’s three samples: 1, 2, 3.
Two things to notice:
1. if you were an author or publisher and it was easy to ignore them before, it isn’t now. Google is going to do stuff like this often… being the front door to the web has its privileges. If you’re an author or publisher, time to play ball.
2. the search results are terrible. They don’t seem to be in any order whatsoever. Not sales, not links, not relevance or date of publication. Sort of like someone threw all the books on the ground and mixed em up. I expect that this will improve, but I’m not sure when.