New search engine for books -- Zercle.com

Zercle.com is a new kind of search engine designed to solve a problem that we experience all the time on book sites such as Amazon.com: We spend a huge amount of time just trying to get a partial grasp of what books are available in our category of interest. For example, if you enter "Group Theory" in the title field at Amazon you'll get 1431 results, the first page of which is mostly psychology books. It's ridiculous.

What if you want a list of all undergraduate-level books in Group Theory that are currently in-print? Good luck. There's no way to get that information, unless you want to spend a few days going through 1431 results.

With Zercle, volunteer editors will create, edit and maintain "book groups" which contain all of the books that are currently in-print in a given category. Zercle has developed special conventions for book-group *names* and *descriptions*, which define a book group. There is also a special method for analyzing the core subject of a book to determine which group or groups are appropriate for the book. This is all detailed in the "Instructions for book group editors" page.

Zercle is a lot like Wikipedia in that, since it is edited by volunteers, it starts off with very little content being there for users (Zercle only launched on Aug 20, 2007). Unlike Wikipedia, however, Zercle requires editors to register and that they be "knowledgeable enough" in the subject areas that they edit. Probably most of you who help out in this sci.math Newsgroup meet that requirement in the math subject areas.

I've already started building a few groups on Zercle myself, in the "quantum mechanics" area, since I'm knowledgeable enough there (BS Physics). If you enter "quantum mechanics" into the Title box on the Zercle front page you'll see those groups. If you also enter, say, "Griffiths" into the Author box, you'll see the specific group which contains the QM book written by that author. I've only just started these groups, so none of them are yet complete. But, as I've already alluded, the idea is to eventually have groups that are complete, so that users can easily discover what books are available in their categories of interest, and authors can pretty much be guaranteed that users have an easy way of discovering their book.

Once Zercle gets going, you and millions of others won't have to waste countless hours on Amazon trying to get a tiny glimpse of what books are available in your particular category of interest. You'll simply enter the title (or title words, and maybe an author's last name) from *any* book in the category into the Zercle query box, and instantly have at your fingertips a *complete* list of the other books in that category, with links to their corresponding Amazon pages.

If you feel that you are knowledgeable enough in a subject area of math (or any other non-fiction subject), check out http://www.zercle.com/ to become an editor. Editors are needed in all non-fiction subject areas (Zercle currently does not support *fiction* categories).

Thanks very much for reading this.

Paul White (founder and developer of Zercle)

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