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I keep a list of books and stories that I’d like to read, and, thanks to an update to Google Book Search, I believe my list is about to get a lot longer; the Google Book Search homepage now essentially gives suggestions every time you visit it.

Google Book Search Gets Commendable UI Update

“We offer a sampling of ‘Interesting books’ that are dynamically selected by Book Search’s algorithms, ‘Classics’ which point to popular books available in public domain, ‘Highly cited’ books which have books for scholarly users and ‘Random subjects’, which showcase books from a selected subject,” stated Pramod Sharma and Garima Sahai, two software engineers, on the Inside Google Book Search blog.

On the whole, this approach leads to a rather scholarly selection.  Yet the “The Indian in the Cupboard,” a childhood favorite of mine, showed up in the course of hitting “refresh” a few times, and the pair of Googlers later continued, “We’ve also added subject links in a left navigation bar as additional entry points into the index.  You can use them to browse books by topic or combine a keyword with the new subject operator to find books that match searches like Garima’s quest to find literature set in California or my hunt last night for a book on dinosaurs for my 7 year old nephew.”

The new update to Google Book Search has made the site much more user-friendly, and is the sort of thing that (in a positive way) can eat up a lot of time.  As a result, it’s likely to earn the service a lot more fans.

Hat tip to Google Blogoscoped’s Philipp Lenssen.