[HN Gopher] Google Books removed all search functions for any bo...
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Google Books removed all search functions for any books with
previews
Author : adamnemecek
Score : 204 points
Date : 2026-01-26 18:05 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (old.reddit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (old.reddit.com)
| adamnemecek wrote:
| The change happened on or around Jan 21. Overnight the results
| went from pretty good to absolute trash.
|
| Here are two screenshots taken on Jan 20 and Jan 23
| https://bsky.app/profile/adamnemecek.bsky.social/post/3mdbup...
|
| They don't do full text search anymore esp for copyrighted books.
| I wonder if this is not a regression but an intent to give them a
| let up in the AI race.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It isn't obvious why the left results are preferred over the
| right results.
| advisedwang wrote:
| The left results are contemporary, the right are decades old.
| That includes editions of the same book --- surely the newer
| edition is going to be preferred by most readers.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I guess. That's not immediately clear to me. However,
| browsing around on Google Books suggests to me that it is
| the corpus which changed, not the algorithms.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| The corpus is still the same, like searching the name of
| the book will find it, but the full text search.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > surely the newer edition is going to be preferred by most
| readers.
|
| Why? Where different editions exist, the reader will want
| to know which one they're getting, but they're unlikely to
| systematically prefer newer editions.
|
| But also, Google Books isn't aimed at "readers". You're not
| supposed to read books through it. It's aimed at searchers.
| Searchers are _even less_ likely to prefer newer editions.
| gjm11 wrote:
| > they're unlikely to systematically prefer newer
| editions
|
| That seems wrong to me. Generally when a new edition of
| something is put out it's (at least nominally) because
| they've made _improvements_.
|
| ("At least nominally" because it may happen that a
| publisher puts out different editions regularly simply
| because by doing so they can get people to keep buying
| them -- e.g., if some university course uses edition E of
| book B then students may feel that they have to get that
| specific edition, and the university may feel that they
| have to ask for the latest edition rather than an earlier
| one so that students can reliably get hold of it, so if
| the publisher puts out a new edition every year that's
| just different for the sake of being different then that
| may net them a lot of sales. But I don't think it's true
| for _most_ books with multiple editions that later ones
| aren 't systematically better than earlier ones.)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > But I don't think it's true for most books with
| multiple editions that later ones aren't systematically
| better than earlier ones.
|
| Most books with multiple editions are books that have
| been translated multiple times. It is definitely true
| that later translations aren't systematically better than
| earlier ones.
| toephu2 wrote:
| Yup, it's for AI.
|
| Similarly, a year ago or so ChatGPT could summarize YouTube
| videos. Google put a stop to that so now only Gemini can
| summarize YouTube videos.
| AJ007 wrote:
| The YT transcripts are linked to on the YT page itself. If
| they remove that, it is trivial to use a local STT model to
| transcribe the video. If they make it impossible to download
| a video, you could just have a microphone record all of the
| sound, and so on. Once you have the transcription of
| anything, summarizing is trivial. I have a local script that
| does this and I use it all of the time. Also produce diagrams
| for YT summaries. Hours saved, per day.
| mystraline wrote:
| Thats easy.
|
| Check out library genesis, Anna's archive, and scihub for
| content.
|
| Piracy isnt theft if buying isnt ownership.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| None of these does full text search.
| jszymborski wrote:
| And they are under constant threat by nation states. sci-hub
| hasn't seen new papers in ages.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Build a local index
| adamnemecek wrote:
| My problem is finding references I don't know about.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| zlibrary does
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Huh, the search is not amazing but it will have to do.
| Thanks! Are there others?
| teraflop wrote:
| The Internet Archive supports full-text search on (AFAIK)
| its entire scanned book collection, even books that
| aren't available for borrowing.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| This is actually pretty good.
| clueless wrote:
| I'd wonder if you'd ever consider putting up a downloadable
| mirror of their full-text search db?
| GorbachevyChase wrote:
| Ironic those doing the most for making information open and
| accessible are the criminals.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Of course. When it's criminal to make information open and
| accessible, only criminals will make information open and
| accessible.
| al_borland wrote:
| A centuries old problem. Early translations of the Bible to
| English were illegal or required licenses.
|
| William Tyndale was put to death for translating the Bible
| into English, which would have been an act to make
| information open and accessible.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > William Tyndale was put to death for translating the
| Bible into English
|
| That's not what he was put to death for. See
| https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/tyndales-
| her... and https://www.chinakasreflections.com/did-the-
| roman-catholic-c...
| kevin42 wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious how you feel about LLMs being trained on
| pirated material. Not being snarky here.
|
| Your comment reflects the old "information wants to be free"
| ideals that used to dominate places like HN, Slashdot, and
| Reddit. But since LLMs arrived, a lot of the loudest voices
| here argue the opposite position when it comes to training
| data.
|
| I've been trying to understand whether people have actually
| changed their views, or whether it's mostly a shift in who is
| speaking up now.
| spongebobstoes wrote:
| why would that change anything? copyright is still a tax on
| the whole of society for the benefit of rich people and
| corporations. it opposes innovation, evolution and progress
|
| maybe a short copyright would be fine (10 year fixed?) but
| copyright as-is seems indefensible to me
| gbear605 wrote:
| Personally, I'd like for copyright to be abolished, and then
| for LLM training to be made illegal for reasons entirely
| unrelated to copyright.
| al_borland wrote:
| It might be time to update the mission statement.
|
| "Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it
| universally accessible and useful"
|
| https://about.google/company-info/
| zb3 wrote:
| * for us, advertisers and our AI models
| ern_ave wrote:
| My guess is that AI training is the main issue.
|
| Data that you can prove was generated by humans is now
| exceedingly valuable ...and most of that comes from the days
| before LLMs. The situation is a bit like how steel
| manufactured before the nuclear age is valuable.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| But why would people train on excerpts from Google Books
| when whole books can be downloaded on libgen and such?
| asdefghyk wrote:
| copyright reasons?
| direwolf20 wrote:
| Both are a copyright violation
| londons_explore wrote:
| Google books is _much_ bigger than libgen.
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| Why it's almost certainly not by choice.
| xorsula1 wrote:
| My guess is they detected being scraped and did this as
| preventive measure.
| breppp wrote:
| my guess is that the copyright landscape changed due to AI
| training, and these publishers won't let Google use that data
| anymore
| adamnemecek wrote:
| The books are still there, it seems like the rankings have
| changed though.
| Andrex wrote:
| My guess is they're cozier with publishers now than 20 years
| ago when they fought all the way to SCOTUS.
|
| "Hey, remove search?"
|
| "OK, it was costing money anyways."
| londons_explore wrote:
| If search gives you a preview with a few surrounding words, it
| is fairly simple to abuse search with quotation marks to
| extract bigger and bigger sections of the books, potentially
| till you have the whole book.
| kingstnap wrote:
| My guess: Text search and indexing is expensive. And you are
| getting some kind of AI vector search instead.
|
| Which tends to be kind of poop compared to true text search.
| storystarling wrote:
| I suspect it's actually the opposite. Standard inverted index
| text search is incredibly cheap and mature. Vector search
| requires generating embeddings and running approximate nearest
| neighbor queries, which is significantly more compute intensive
| than simple keyword matching. If they switched, it wasn't to
| save on compute costs.
| abetusk wrote:
| Anna's Archive [0]:
|
| > The largest truly open library in human history
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive
| cft wrote:
| Mirrors https://open-slum.org/
| belter wrote:
| How funny. They have a DMCA Takedown Requests link...
| bigwheels wrote:
| Open-slum currently experiencing heavy traffic, but here's an
| additional mirror: https://open-slum.pages.dev/
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Title is: Google has seemingly entirely removed search
| functionality from most books on Google Books
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Since I pretty much only use Google Books for public domain
| books, old magazines, and newspapers I haven't noticed any
| problem with it. Maybe it's not as dead as this person thinks.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| No the search results went from pretty good to absolute garbage
| https://bsky.app/profile/adamnemecek.bsky.social/post/3mdbup...
| mikestew wrote:
| This was addressed in the post, I'm sure you just missed it
| when you read it:
|
| "But a few days ago they removed ALL search functions for any
| books with previews, which are _disproportionately modern
| books_. " <emphasis mine>
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| right, my point was just because what they use it for is now
| useless mine isn't and personally I think mine is more
| useful.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Google Books is long dead. If you click on the author's name in
| one of the results, it will search inauthor:"Author's Name" and
| this search will return garbage because it chokes on double
| quotes. This has been true for at least a couple of years; Google
| Books is not compatible with itself. Changing the double quotes
| to single quotes fixes it. Also, lately, when you filter only for
| books that have Full View some results that have Full View get
| dropped for no intelligible reason.
|
| Nobody is looking at it. I wouldn't be surprised if the preview
| search was switched off by accident.
|
| For me Books is only useful (and it is very useful) for books out
| of copyright, 100+ years old. Sometimes they aren't at
| archive.org.
|
| I hate Google, but I think it's a bit absurd to criticize them on
| this if somehow it's over AI. The only reason Google created
| Books may even have been AI, but they were hoping to have the
| books open to everyone, and the publishers and authors whose full
| text is being blocked are literally the people who stopped it
| from happening. Maybe they spoke up about AI, too. I find it even
| hard to even criticize that Google doesn't take care of Books -
| it has no purpose or profit potential for them anymore, it's
| obviously charity that they don't take it down completely.
| didip wrote:
| Google Books could have been a subscription service ala Netflix.
|
| Then it would have been hella useful.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Remember that preview functionality is granted by contract _with
| the publishers_. Which is why some books have it and some books
| don 't.
|
| Almost certainly, this is something that publishers requested the
| removal of, under threat of requiring previews to be removed
| _entirely_.
|
| Books that are out of copyright still have full search and
| display enabled.
|
| So blame publishers, not Google.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| The previews are still there though, they just don't rank.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Right, that's what I'm saying. For whatever reason it seems
| publishers decided they don't want their preview-only books
| as part of the full-text search across all books. If they
| decide that, Google has to comply.
|
| This isn't like web search where web pages are publicly
| available and so Google can return search results across
| whatever it wants. For books, it relies on publisher
| cooperation to both supply book contents for indexing under
| license and give permissions for preview. If publishers say
| to turn off search, Google turns off search.
| tamarinddreams wrote:
| Given the argument over LLMs consuming books illegally, I think
| publishers could be a little concerned that an LLM that
| combined partial previews on every modern work on a subject
| might be a destroyer of the market for the average book on the
| subject with the license to do so having been properly granted
| via this feature.
| abetusk wrote:
| I will blame overlong copyright term lengths. 70 years after
| authors death or 95 years after publication, allowing most
| recent work to enter the commons effectively after a century,
| or more, from now [0].
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
| Analemma_ wrote:
| This is the rare case when Europe is even worse. Metropolis,
| the 1927 Fritz Lang film, is out of copyright in the United
| States but will still be in copyright in Germany until 2047:
| 120 fucking years.
|
| It's preposterous, and offensive to anyone's intelligence to
| claim that this is about incentivizing production; does
| anyone seriously believe there is a potential artist out
| there who would avoid making their magnum opus if it could
| only be under copyright for 119 years?
| antonvs wrote:
| The problem is, copyright law is no longer about artists,
| if it ever was: it's about corporations, i.e. maximizing
| the value corporations can extract from intellectual
| property.
|
| This post which was on the front page today is relevant:
| https://alexwennerberg.com/blog/2026-01-25-slop.html
| pfdietz wrote:
| So, if you search for some text that occurs at the end of one
| chunk, will it then preview a following chunk? And could chaining
| these chunks give you the entire book?
|
| If so, I could see someone doing this to exfiltrate books.
| crazygringo wrote:
| You're talking about in-book search (TFA is about search across
| all books), and yes that was indeed once a known technique for
| extracting whole or nearly whole books.
|
| That's why publishers responded by excluding sections of books
| from search (it will list the pages but you can't view them),
| and individual Google accounts became limited in how many extra
| pages they were ever allowed to see of an individual book
| beyond the standard preview pages.
|
| But then LibGen, Z-lib, and Anna's Archive became popular and
| built up their collections...
| Zathman wrote:
| I just checked and yes, search inside of books with previews is
| still possible.
|
| (a) when you search books.google.com and find a book with a
| preview, it opens their new book viewer - the search is at the
| bottom of the page. You can also click "View All" to see all
| references of your search in that book.
|
| (b) if you go to the book homepage (clicking X in the top right
| of the book viewer if that opened), there's still a "Search
| Inside Book" next to the "Preview" button under the title.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| But you have to know what book you are looking for.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Among the less-important things I'd like to send back in time to
| my past-self:
|
| "The trend in digitized book passages will reverse, and they will
| become _harder and harder_ to find with time, so clip your own
| copies of everything you like to quote. "
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| Done to satisfy the copyright barons.
|
| Protest this by pirating, until copyright terms are reduced to
| make copyright once again a net benefit for society.
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(page generated 2026-01-27 10:01 UTC)