JD picks up on another new Google feature: scanned images of mail-order catalogs. Google is now the Amazon.Com of information.

The interface for browsing the catalogs is pretty cool. There are three levels of resolution for each page. Thumbnail, two-page and one-page views. And the phone number for the catalog is on every page (along with a URL).

And the very cool part is that the catalog includes what Google does best: search. Type something into the search form and then you'll find all the matches for those words in the catalog. There's a thumbnail of the catalog cover, the page where the word was found (highlighted where on the page the match is) and then zoomed in on the actual part of the page where the match is and get this, all the words are highlighted on the image. That's some mighty fine optical character recognition.

From November 23, 2000 in The Guardian. Sergey Brin: "Some companies have tried to do that today but they do not work very well, which is why Google still returns documents. In the future, Google will be your interface to all the world's knowledge - not just web pages."
12:21:38 AM