Google is still constantly innovating. Not satisfied with being the number one search engine, they have launched many other projects and services, all of them as successful as the main Google is. Among these, their Gmail webmail which has become my one and only email, and the fantastic Google Earth providing worldwide satellite photo coverage through computer based software.
One of the newcomers is Google Books. Google has undertaken the gargantuesque task of scanning books and making them available to internet searches by titles, authors, publishers and… content! Yes, you read this right, content too. One can now do a Google Book Search for a specific line, paragraph or quote and be given a reference for the book, and in most cases a preview of the page containing the search terms!
Of course, this will probably take years to complete. And Google can only freely index the content of public domain books, for obvious copyright reasons. But if the publisher and/or author submit their book(s) and give their agreement, Google will index their work and make it available to searches, while restricting the previewing feature to a few pages.
That’s what I did for "Les aventures d’un GO désorganisé" and it was just recently indexed by Google, meaning that you can now go to Google Book Search and if you do a search for the expression "oeufs roses migrateurs de baleine", you will actually get a search result for the relevant page of the book!
Granted, the process isn’t quite perfect yet and some letters seem to get distorted by the scanning. But what an extraordinary start!