Amazon.com today lauched a full content search covering 33 million pages and 120,000 books. It is Amazon.com only at the minute, but is a really interesting idea.
Essentially it is a challenge to the dominance of Google in terms of an interface to the knowledge in the world. Google may be the webpage search engine of choice, but most of the world's knowledge is still in books. Now that is available from amazon.com, though only at a page at a time, but this might be sufficient to offer up some thing sufficiently different from Google. Certainly for something other than tech subjects Amazon might have cornered a market.
Thanks to Ben Hammersley for the pointer.
people, systems and design: October 2003 Archives
The BBC launched iCAN, the civic participation project that has been evolving beside me for most of this year, whilst I managed the database behind the registration system.
It is maybe hard to get it right now, as it is a bit empty, but go and see what campaigns and issues there are that interest you in you area, then register and start a local campaign. I think that it will be fascinating to watch it grow out of beta and through the next couple of iterations.
