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nickg5Flag for United States of America

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are you the world's best web searcher?

The name of a book is not known.

On a scale of 0 to 100 per cent, what are the chances of searching for the book using one sentence from the book, or a paragraph, etc.?
Using the internet or other search tool.

Assume the author has a pen name and thus their real name can not be used, and the pen name is unknown.

The only other information that might be available would be the state in which the author was born and the adjacent state is which they lived and passed away.

Thanks.
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Rogiee
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It would all depend on how well known the book is.  Is it an obscure book than sold 2000 copies or a best seller?


Any semi-well known books should be pretty easy to find.
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I am fairly good on Google myself, some times.

If the book never gets published then the name won't be needed.

If it does get published the number of book sold will be unknown, because the name of the book and the author may not be known. But, a copy of the transcript of the book could be known, but without the title.
With the author being an ordinary U.S. citizen, age 79, I'd not expect it to become a best seller.
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Here is a massive list of search engines.
http://www.thesearchenginelist.com/

Is Google the best?

Would the fact that the desired search "phrase" is a sentence from a book, and not a phrase or sentence from some other document, increase the chances?

I would start with google but depending on the results would possibly move to other engines. It could possibly be diagramed in a 20 questions style flowchart.
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This is not the sentence from the book, but just an example.

If a sentence from the book, who's title is not known, was:
"And the child frolicked throughout the meadow of flowers as the sun began it's fall to the horizon."

dqmq:
So, you say there is a 100% way to search
"and find"
such a sentence, so as to locate the name of the publication from which it came?
This example:
http://books.google.com/m#Search
It finds the book

Dqmq is simply stating the unlimited resources principle. With no time or resource constraint it's always 100%
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aarontomosky:
so from that book.google link, the entire sentence would go in the search box, and locate the source of as many words in the sentence as it can find?
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Throw down the glove.
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I do not know any of the information. I know the author's name but they could use a pen name. I know the author's birth state and current state of residence.

I'm "planning" ahead, to try to know what minimum information I might need to locate the book, if the book exist. Currently, from what I know, it has not been published. If I get information in the future that the person did publish their book, I may very likely not know the title.

Masqueraid:
You have used the word "indexed."
Would a published book be indexed, or not indexed, depending on what?
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The book would most likely be published through a book publisher, and not self published on the internet.
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☠ MASQ ☠

Then the chances of finding a random quote from it would be very small indeed.
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so we have a near 100% from dqmq.
and we have less than "x" per cent from masqueraid.

I think dqmq may be intending to take you literally using any "other search tool" - that philosophical approach may take considerably longer to return a result :)
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I'm not sure what "other" search tools, implied by dqmq.

When the time comes for the search, we'll see, with a new question.
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When the time comes for the search, we'll see, with a new question.