I’ve been spending my weekend playing with how Google Books could guide Web search after someone asked me about #3 in Five Ways Google Could Improve Search In 2025 That Have Nothing To Do With AI. How could Google Books make search better? I had some ideas and I applied JavaScript to them. After a few days of doodling around I’m at that point where I’ve got something that works so well I keep falling down rabbit holes playing with it. 😂

How the program works: the user enters a search query and an OpenAI call generates Library of Congress-style topics headings for the query. (I suspect Google has enough data between the search engine and Google Books that they can do this with their own systems, but I have to use what I’ve got.)

One of the searches I tried was for psychedelics. It can be a tough Web search to do because there are several different categories of information related to psychedelics, including cultural, spiritual, legal, and medical, and without a detailed search from the search you have to wade through a lot of useless content. The program searches Google Books for the query and the topic headers, using Google Books’ advanced subject: syntax. (It also does a separate all-keyword search for the terms in case the category search comes up empty.)

Instead of getting Web pages for your results, you get books. Books each with their own slant on the query you’re searching. The screenshot shows the books under the “Books about Psychedelic Therapy,” header but there were other categories of result as well, including “Books about Mind-Altering Substances,” “Books about Consciousness Studies,” and “Books about Spiritual Use of Psychedelics.” Even before you start exploring the results, they’re sliced into broad categories based on book subject.

Each book in the results has a detail page.

At the bottom of the page is a “Search with Mojeek” button that turns the book’s description information (via another OpenAI call) into a set of related concepts that the user can toggle into and out of a Mojeek search.

The “Psychedelic Psychotherapy” and “Therapeutic Potential” buttons are green because I’ve clicked on them to include them in the Mojeek search form. The form always includes the initial query (in this case psychedelics) but the other concepts/terms can be toggled in and out of the search by clicking on them. Users can also edit the query directly if they desire. Once the query is to the user’s liking, they just have to click “Search Mojeek” and a page of search results opens in a new tab.

I like the idea of taking a search query, using it to generate as its search results a set of information aggregates (books), and then using those aggregates to each generate a set of related search concepts which are in turn applied to a Mojeek search. It’s giving me both broad topics with which I can do my searching but at the same time providing me lots of concept keywords so I can cover a lot of ground searching just within that topic.

I’m calling this kind of search “Concept compassing” in my head because I need a phrase for it instead of just the general feeling of turning something inside out.