Google is making its controversial engine available to publishers interested in putting it on their Web sites. This is the first time Google"s Book Search service has been available outside of its main site in the Google.com domain. This co-branded search program benefits Google because the search engine will now be available more broadly. Meanwhile, publishers benefit by offering an additional search service to their Web site visitors.
Publishers can tailor the index of their search engine so that only books published by them show up in the query results, Google said Friday. As in the main Book Search site, these result pages give users the option to link to online shops that sell the listed books. Interestingly, one of the publishers that put Book Search on its Web site is The McGraw-Hill Companies. Along with other major publishers, McGraw-Hill is suing Google for copyright infringement over Google"s ongoing project to scan millions of copyright books without permission. Although McGraw-Hill"s position may seem at first contradictory, it stems from the fact that Google"s Book Search service has two main pieces.