Amazon.com recently created a new feature on their site called “SIPs” which stands for “Statistically Improbable Phrases.” You’ll see a list of them sometimes underneath the title of whatever book you’re looking at. This is how their help page describes them:

Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, show you the interesting, distinctive, or unlikely phrases that occur in the text of books in Search Inside the Book. Our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to how many times it occurs across all Search Inside books, that phrase is a SIP in that book.

For example, I spotted some interesting ones in that Carlos Castaneda “The Active Side of Infinity Book.” The full SIP list for that book is:

cloud shaman, glowing coat, definitive journey, inorganic beings, foreign installation, assemblage point, luminous filaments, sorcerers call, old sorcerers, inner silence, perceived energy, hidden option, king vulture, anthropologist friend, twin world, dead donkey

Pretty cool cause it gives sort of a quick run-down of some basic building blocks that make the book unique. I’d sort of like to see an SIPs list for my blog versus other blogs. I bet there’d be some pretty interesting shit on it. Oh, also, one other cool feature: they analyze for SIPs and also provide links to other books where those SIPs can be found. For example, here’s their list of occurrences of the phrase “inorganic beings” in this and other books (many by Castaneda).