MSN announced yesterday their intent to build a book search feature. It’s just a press release at this point. The first pass is to index publicly available books. Makes sense. The collection will need to be much, much larger though and I only hope the publishers get their act together and work through the issues with MSN versus fighting as they are with Google.
Also in search news yesterday, Google is working on a Craigslist-like online database of “stuff” (called GoogleBase), albeit with a decidedly Google-engineered design and structure.
A question comes to mind with a “classified-ad-like-system” such as GoogleBase: Will I trust the contents more or less if it’s posted on a Google service? If GoogleBase goes the direction of Blogger, the answer won’t be good. If GoogleBase goes the direction of AdSense, it’ll probably be OK. Which is Google’s true DNA? This should be interesting to watch. It’ll probably greatly depend on the quality of some of the early Base posters.