Ultrapedia Beta
About Ultrapedia
Ultrapedia is a search engine for recognized (OCR’d) books. We have so far recognised about 35 thousand books, mostly from Google Book Search. These books are either in the public domain, or out of copyright. We have made around twenty thousand books from the library available for full text search and retrieval.
Ultrapedia is one of several projects currently in work at Secret Studio who are, among other things, experts in digitising all kinds of books and documents. Secret Studio operates one of the worlds largest OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Farms. Our servers are fed a steady stream of books in the form of large PDF image files which are processed by the servers in the OCR Farm into Recognised versions of the book or publication.
The OCR technique we employ is very thorough, and uniquely, retains the look and feel of the original written book. This allows the search engine to deliver almost a "carbon copy" of the original book, and not just a text extract from the original. Optical Character Recognition not only shrinks the size of the books by up to 90%, but it also allows us to create a fully searchable version of the book.
Its been very hectic at Secret Studio HQ recently. You will immediately notice our new search interface for the Ultrapedia Library, which provides a range of search, navigation and discovery tools. You can execute natural language queries or easily construct advanced Boolean and proximity queries. Navigate, drill down and instantly locate the right information with the click of a mouse button, and ‘search within’ queries, with hit highlighting and hit-to-hit navigation. Discover associations and connections between your search terms and the entities that are automatically identified within your search results or further drill down your search via the Entities in the left hand side panel.
Our legacy Library Browse shows a thumbnail of the title page of the book and comprehensive details including book title, author, publisher, genre, ISBN, publisher, no of pages, size of book, summary, editor and format for most of the books.
The site is still officially in beta, which means it works most of the time I guess, but if you like reading old books you might enjoy it. You will have to enter an email address to actually view or download books from the library, but apart from that it is currently open to the public - with no adverts or other visible means of support.
About Secret Studio
Secret Studio was established in 2004 to co-ordinate and manage several web research and development projects. The Ultrapedia search engine is one of these projects and owned and run by the folks at Secret Studio.