I'm excited that so many search engines, such as Amazon's A9 and Google are directing people to, of all things, books. We know that not everything is on the web, and books contain valuable information, but if they're not represented somehow in the web search engine results, all that good stuff will go to waste.
Yahoo search is now getting into the act with their recent announcement that they will join the OCLC Open WorldCat Project. Two million cataloging records are now included in Yahoo search results, complete with a list of libraries holding any particular item. For more details see Barbara Quint's Newsbreak, Yahoo! Search Joins OCLC Open WorldCat Project.
The sample search discussed in the Newsbreak is for the Da Vinci Code. So I tried it...but couldn't find the OCLC record. So I added OCLC to the search. Okay, normally people wouldn't do this, but the Da Vinci Code is a fairly popular topic for discussion so while it's in the search results somewhere, I lost patience at about item 40. Here, you can go directly to the record if you'd like to see what it looks like.
Would books actually ever rank high enough in a REAL search? It happened to Steven Cohen when using Google, so it can happen to you, too!
For more analysis of Yahoo's inclusion of Worldcat records, see ResourceShelf: Two Million Records Hit the Yahoo Database.
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