One of Google's most controversial products, Book Search, may be getting unwanted attention from the US Department of Justice and some less than appreciative words from some of its competitors but development is going ahead as planed. Just recently the company announced a major update bringing better search and sharing tools to the service and now it is introducing another small feature.

“Today I'm excited to announce one more addition to the experience of searching a book: search results in your scrollbar. Now when you search in a book, little hints will appear in the margin to indicate where your results are located. When you hover over one of these annotations, you'll get a quick preview of the search results and the option of jumping directly to the associated page,” Casey Ho, software engineer, Google Book Search, wrote, announcing the update.

While it may be a simple tweak, it is very ingenious and brings a lot of functionality. While the enhanced search made it easier to find the terms you were looking for, actually locating them throughout the book wasn't as straightforward as it could be. The new feature adds small visual cues in the scroll bar, indicating where the results are located and making it easy to go directly to one. Hovering the mouse over one of the rectangles pops up a small preview of the content around the search term and the option of jumping directly to that page.

Earlier this month Google upgraded much of Book Search's functionality by highlighting the search terms and showing the results in context surrounded by the snippet of text around the query. Navigating a book or magazine was also made a lot easier with a thumbnail preview mode and animated page turn buttons. The biggest feature, though, was the possibility to easily embed pages or whole books in a blog or site using a simple code snippet.