SIP this, man

Amazon has a weird new feature up called SIPs, or Statistically Improbable Phrases.

It piggybacks off their Search Inside feature that lets you browse several pages of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of books that they've scanned into their system.

Here's the description of a SIP:

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 instance, here are a few SIPs from the book Thunder Run by David Zucchino: spaghetti interchange, coax guns, fire from the mosque, and suicide vehicles.

Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind has "value relativism" as an SIP.

Masters of Doom by David Kushner has just three: shareware market, biz guy, diminished lighting.

I'm not quite sure what the usefulness of this feature is, but it is kinda cool.