Amazon.com launched a new service today that lets you search the full text inside the book for more than 120,000 books (33 million pages).

After you search as usual for books containing a word or phrase (such as “biological intelligence”), you can click on the “See more references to ‘biological intelligence’ in this book” link (for participating books) to see excerpts from all the pages where “biological intelligence” appears.

To browse pages from the book, simply click on the link; from there, you can browse forward and back two pages. A navigation bar above the page lets you search for other terms in the book and browse other pages.

We searched for “biological intelligence” and got 75 results. But we discovered a way to extend this. A search on Google for “biological intelligence” with the Domain constrained to “amazon.com” returned 6 unique hits, one of which was William H. Calvin’s How Brains Think: Evolving Intelligence, Then and Now, which was not included in the Amazon.com results. Searching for “William H. Calvin” on amazon.com took us to that book; by searching inside the book for “biological intelligence,” we got seven new results that allowed us to browse those pages.

Now if only we had a macro for recording Web-page browsing sequences …