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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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Planet
Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know by
Randall Stross |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Everything New York Times writer Randall Stross presents
an interesting and readable new book titled, Planet
Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know.
Stross describes Google’s efforts to organize all the information in the
world and he does so in ways that are more like a suspense novel than a
business book. The result for me is that I became more intrigued as I read
on. Here’s an excerpt, from the end of Chapter 4, “Moon Shot,” pp.
107-8: The
most important, and most conspicuous, advance for Google Book Search was its
attainment of a critical mass of recently published books. Before 2007, a
book search on Google was hit-or-miss, emphasis on miss. Then, suddenly, it
seemed to be able to come up with most any title that was in print. The
number of books that had been scanned remained small: the company said in
September 2007 that
it had indexed about 1 million volumes, which left it well short of the
WorldCat's 32 million and nowhere near the pace that would be needed to
complete the project within the eight years left to meet the original
ten-year goal. And yet Google, somewhat miraculously, had achieved excellent
coverage of recently published works. How had it done so? In May 2007, it quietly
made the biggest change since it had started the moon shot: it added listings
for books whose text had not been indexed, using publicly available
bibliographic information drawn from online library catalogs around the
world. Overnight, Google Books added all books in print without waiting to
scan and index them. These
books were displayed on Google's search results page with "no preview
available," a new category distinguishing it from "full
preview" (books in the public domain), "limited preview"
(books under copyright for which Google has secured permission to show a
limited number of pages in its Book Partners Program), and `snippet
view" (books under copyright for which Google had not secured permission
to display pages) . The entries for the "no preview"
books were placeholders, but they provided far more than barebones
card-catalog information: lists of references from Web pages; reviews of the
book that were available online; references to the books that had been found
in other books that were already indexed; and references from scholarly works
indexed in Google Scholar. After it arrived at the realization that it had
enormous amounts of useful information about books in other silos, including
the largest one the Web Google could offer users a rich array of
supplementary information about any given title, and it could do so without
infringing on the rights of the book's copyright holders. One
has to admire the ingenuity of Google's staff, using Google's vast
information assets to augment what could be known about a book beyond a
bibliographic card. At the same time, one also has to wonder how foolish it
had been for Google to be so impatient to build up its book collection that
it had asserted a right to make digital copies of books in print without the
permission of copyright holders. The two lawsuits filed against it by
publishers and by the Authors Guild continued to grind on. In early 2008, the
presiding U.S. District Court judge, John E. Sprizzo, set a deadline of April
2009 for
submission of motions for summary judgment; trials will come still later. Everything
that Google used to create a customized Web site in 2007 for any book had
also been available to it in 2004. Google's Book Search managers may have
been blind to the opportunities to cross-link across different silos of
information that was in the public domain because such incremental
improvements lacked the stirring scale of the near impossible, the
transfixing imagery of a moon shot. With
twenty-eight participating libraries, Google's Book Search collections
continued to grow as the scanning proceeded, still entirely out of public
view. In February 2008,
the University of Michigan was the first library to reach the mark
of one million books online (361,441,145 total pages and counting). The
progress was not as fast as the original moon shoes-6.5 million books in the
university's collections remained to be scanned—but an end was within sight.
The university expected to complete the project "early in the next
decade." The
legal issues remained outstanding, but the logistical issues seemed to have
been tamed. Google was well along in its endeavor to bring the entire world
of published text into its digital storehouse. Even
when Stross describes Google’s missteps, the story remains interesting. Planet
Google provides a clear explanation of where Google came from and where
it is trying to go. For the story to date, it’s fascinating reading. Steve
Hopkins, November 20, 2008 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the December 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Planet Google.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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