---
title: 'Where Did That Quote Come From, Again?'
date: '2003-10-23T13:24:26-04:00'
permalink: /where-did-that-quote-come-from-again/
tags:
    - internets
---

Perhaps the best new bit of net technology I’ve seen in some time (okay, right after the [iPod](/new_toy/)/[iTunes](http://www.apple.com/itunes)/[iTunes Music Store](http://www.apple.com/itunes/store) troika) has come to us today from, of all places, [Amazon.com](http://www.amazon.com): full-text content searching of over a hundred thousand of the books in the database. The results give you not simply a list of the books that contain your search string within their text, but the page citation, the context of the quote, and a link to an image of the page on which the string appears.

Should I be surprised that this technology has been developed for a mass marketer of books, rather than, say, a library?