Quote:
Originally Posted by meeera
Yes - however I am thinking of a high quality search engine, which gives results with a sentence or so of context, not merely a list of page numbers on which the searched word appears.
That combined with a high-quality Table of Contents certainly gives me everything I could ever need. I'd ask for my money back on any book that had hard coded page numbers everywhere.
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A simple example of something I could get from an index, but not a search:
The author Charles Dickens lived in many different houses over the course of his life. In a good biography of Dickens, I can look up "house" or "home" in the index, and I'll get a list of all the houses that Dickens lived in, with text references for each one. There is no simple search I could do in the book which would get me such a list. As I said in my previous post, an index allows you to search on topics rather than on just words that appear in the text.