Amazon full-text search
Amazon.com announced yesterday that they have made the entire text of 120,000 books searchable. This feature is automatic when you use their regular search. I have to wonder how much load it puts on their servers to search so much data on every query.
This seems a bit beta-quality right now. Searches for "Javascript" and "MCSE" seemed polluted with unnecessary excerpts–if the word is in the title, how does an excerpt from Page 11 help? The search ranking is also a bit arbitrary. The first result in a search for "Moncur" is an unrelated book that mentions someone by that name in the acknowledgments.
On the plus side, they’ve added a Search inside this book feature for individual books. This goes a long way toward making Amazon as useful as a real-world bookstore–you can search through a nonfiction book to see if it has what you need.