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ps: the distribution of the full text availability for the sample considered was as follows: No preview: 797 (93.5%) Partial preview: 53 (6.2%) Full text: 2 (0.2%) - Godmar On Tue, May 6, 2008 at 6:09 PM, Godmar Back <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Hi, > > to examine the usability of Google's book viewability API when lookup > is done via ISBN, we did some experiments, the results of which I'd > like to share. [1] > > For 1000 randomly drawn ISBN from 3,192,809 ISBN extracted from a > snapshot of LoC's records [2], Google Books returned results for 852 > ISBN. We then downloaded the page that was referred to in the > "info_url" parameter of the response (which is the "About" page Google > provides) for each result. > > To examine whether Google retrieved the correct book, we checked if > the Info page contained the ISBN for which we'd searched. 815 out of > 852 contained the same ISBN. 37 results referred to a different ISBN > than the one searched for. We examined the 37 results manually: 33 > referred to a different edition of the book whose ISBN was used to > search, as judged by comparing author/title information with OCLC's > xISBN service. (We compared the author/title returned by xISBN with > the author/title listed on Google's book information page.) 4 records > appeared to be misindexed. > > I found the results (85.2% recall and >99% precision, if you allow for > the ISBN substitution; with a 3.1% margin of error) surprisingly high. > > - Godmar > > [1] http://top.cs.vt.edu/~gback/gbs-accuracy-study/ > [2] http://www.archive.org/details/marc_records_scriblio_net >