eBook Search Engine

I’ve mentioned earlier on my blog that I’m a big fan of ebooks (because of the ease of reading that they offer), and I came across this new ebook search engine which allows you to search pdf, doc, rtf, ppt, and txt versions of ebooks. It’s called eBook Search Queen. In theory it does seem to be a good idea – a dedicated search engine for ebooks can deliver more targeted results to you. Sadly, that doesn’t turn out to be the case. What seems to be good idea falls flat on its face because of an insufficient index.

I started off searching for a few current novels to see whether it indexes copyrighted stuff too. Like State of Fear (environmentalists, read this for some food for thought) and Jurassic Park (it’s nothing like the movie at all) by Michael Crichton. Disappointing results. Then I searched something a bit older – Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair At Styles and And Then There Were None (aside – this novel is too brilliant, you should read it). Again disappointing results. Then I threw something more popular at it – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – and struck oil. The first result it threw up was the PDF of Dark Miasma’s reelease of the book. eBook Search Queen has a built-in preview feature so you can take a peek and decide whether you want to download the full thing or not.

I tried public domain texts such as Gulliver’s Travels (got what I wanted) and Arabian Nights (didn’t get what I wanted). Overall, the impression that I get is that right now across any kind of genre / timeline that you’re searching, you’ll get a good collection of academic essays, presentations and analyses of the books you’re looking for. If you actually want the book itself – which is the whole point of an ebook – then you’d be disappointed. Whether thosw books are available or not would depend on whether anyone has uploaded them publicly on their hosting – and that would be really few people who would take risks like that putting up copyrighted content. Otherwise if you’re looking for good analyses of text for some school / college work, then eBook Search Queen is excellent. Can work a bit on the speed of searching though.