Friday, March 17, 2006

Bugs in Google Print metadata searching

Google Print has been indexing public-domain numismatic publications. Here is the Numismatic Chronicle for 1845:

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=ZTNN6eY5CLUC.

This page gives the volume's title as 'The Numismatic Chronicle' and the publisher as 'Royal Numismatic Society' so Google has the correct meta-data. However, this book does not appear when an Advanced Search is done for the title 'Numismatic Chronicle' or the publisher 'Royal Numismatic Society'.

Searching for the publisher 'Royal Numismatic Society' is expressed as "inpublisher:royal inpublisher:numismatic inpublisher:society" in Google Print's search box. Like inpublisher, there is an intitle tag for searching for words in the title.

Oddly, the search for Royal Numismatic Society gives only one hit, and that hit isn't the 1845 volume we saw earlier.

Searching for "intitle:numismatic" gives 32500 hits! Yet searching for "intitle:numismatic intitle:chronicle" gives only one hit, and it isn't the 1845 volume we saw earlier.

Google has scanned and indexed at least 17 volumes of The Numismatic Chronicle (see Num. Chron. for a list) yet only one appears.

This seems like a bug in Google's meta-data search.

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Wayne Sayles has started a blog

Wayne Sayles has a new blog on ancient coin collecting and cultural property issues.