http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/10/inside-the-google-books-algorithm/65422/How the search algorithm works in Google Books Rich Results is the latest in a series of smaller front-end tweaks that have been matched by backend improvements. Now, the book search algorithm takes into account more than 100 "signals," individual...
continue reading "Inside the Google Books Algorithm" »
comments (0)
Hi Dan. I know it must have been a stressful week for you. So I hesitate to ask you for a favor. But there are a lot of people in the scholarly/library community who have unanswered questions about the terms...
continue reading "Dan Clancy answers a few quick questions about the new Google Book Search settlement" »
Interesting post by Liz Losh about a troubling turn of events: Wednesday, September 02, 2009 The Googlization of the BNF Lunch yesterday with the former head of the bibliothèque nationale de France, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, was filled with the recent drama...
continue reading "virtualpolitik: The Googlization of the BNF" »
Check it out: Untitled from andrewkeen on Vimeo....
continue reading "Andrew Keen interviews me about Google books on Telegraph Blogs" »
">The 800 Pound Gorillas in the Room - Part 1: Authors & Leaders Speculate on the Future of Google & Author Rights 2:30PM - 3:30PM (Friday, May 29, 2009) Panelist: Paul Aiken - Exec., Dir., The Authors Guild Michael Cader...
continue reading "I'm speaking Friday in NYC at BookExpo America" »
Walt Crawford, who writes a valuable library blog called Walt at Random, took issue with my use of the term "privatization" to describe the Google Book Search project. He wrote a long response to Karen Coyle's criticism of his...
continue reading "Is the Google Book Search project a "privatization" of library resources and functions?" »
O'Reilly Radar: Conclusion In the short run, the Google Book Search settlement will unquestionably bring about greater access to books collected by major research libraries over the years. But it is very worrisome that this agreement, which was negotiated in...
continue reading "Pam Samuelson: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement - O'Reilly Radar" »
NYTimes.com: The New York Times April 4, 2009 Google's Plan for Out-of-Print Books Is Challenged By MIGUEL HELFT SAN FRANCISCO -- The dusty stacks of the nation's great university and research libraries are full of orphans -- books that the...
continue reading "Google Books Raising Alarm in Academia " »
Au Courant: Google, Robert Darnton, and the Digital Republic of Letters Robert Darnton recently published an essay in the New York Review of Books on the Google settlement. There has been much commentary in blogs, listserves, and print media. Below...
continue reading "Paul Courant replies to Darnton " »
Balkinization: Beyond Competition: Preparing for a Google Book Search Monopoly Frank Pasquale Like Robert Darnton, I look to the upcoming Google Book Search Settlement hearing with a mixture of wonder and trepidation. The prospect of constructing a digital library of...
continue reading "Pasquale on the GBS settlement" »
From Books Do Furnish a Room: Publishing, Copyright, Google I'll start with a confession: I was wrong about the Google Books Project. And my wrongness is underscored by just how right Siva Vaidhyanathan--whose worries I dismissed at the time as...
continue reading "Second thoughts on Google Book Search -- post-settlement" »
Rough Type: All hail the information triumvirate! January 22, 2009 I was reading an interview today with Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopedia Britannica, in which he describes some of the Web 2.0-y tools that the company is preparing to...
continue reading "Nicholas Carr on the Google-Wikipedia symbiosis" »
New York Review of Books: Volume 56, Number 2 · February 12, 2009 Google & the Future of Books By Robert Darnton How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question...
continue reading "Darnton on Google Book Search " »
Timothy Vollmer offers us this great list. Check it out....
continue reading "Google Book Settlement Link Dump " »
NYTimes.com: November 30, 2008 Op-Ed Contributor How to Publish Without Perishing By JAMES GLEICK THE gloom that has fallen over the book publishing industry is different from the mood in, say, home building. At least people know we'll always need...
continue reading "Gleick on 'How to Publish Without Perishing' " »
From Google Blog: Search and find magazines on Google Book Search 12/09/2008 09:47:00 AM The word "magazine" is derived from the Arabic word "makhazin," meaning storehouse. Since Daniel Defoe published the world's first English magazine back in 1704, millions of...
continue reading "Magazines on Google Book Search" »
John Wilkin's blog - The launch of HathiTrust ... Is this an effort that will compete with Google Book Search? We believe in the value the private sector can bring to great challenges like discovery, but we also believe that...
continue reading "John Wilkin explains HathiTrust" »
Waking up to Books in Richmond: One of the irksome characteristics of the proposed Google Book Search settlement is the restricted access to the service at public libraries. Public libraries, we must recall, have long been public temples dedicated to...
continue reading "Peter Brantley on the problem with GBS's limited access" »
Coyle's InFormation: This Google/AAP settlement has hit my brain like a steel ball in a pinball machine, careening around and setting off bells and lights in all directions. In other words, where do I start? Reading the FAQ (not the...
continue reading "Karen Coyle's great analysis of GBS settlement" »
GBS is not a bookstore ... Please. Give me a break. Google Book Search, libraries, Amazon, and brick and mortar booksellers are not mutually substitutable vendors in the marketplace. FAIL. The question of the suits was not about obtaining access...
continue reading "Peter Brantley responds to Google's defense of price-fixing accusations with GBS settlement" »
The Laboratorium: Conclusion The starting point for all of this analysis has been that Google and the copyright owners are asking a federal court to put the United States’s judicial power behind a document they have presented to it. The...
continue reading "James Grimmelmann's comprehensive and essential analysis of the GBS settlement" »
Last week I asked Google's lawyers the following questions and received the following responses, which I have paraphrased: • Isn't this a tremendous anti-trust problem? Google has essentially set up a huge compulsory licensing system without the legislation that usually...
continue reading "Some initial answers to my initial questions about Google Book Search and the settlment" »
The Guardian: ... Amid all the reactions, an overall lesson should be how little can be determined by legalism, and how much remains unsettled as new technology causes shifts in markets and power. There's some value in enemy-of-my-enemy opposition, where...
continue reading "Seth on GBS settlement" »
Peter Suber, Open Access News...
continue reading "Must Read: Peter Suber summarizes and excerpts reactions to GBS settlement" »
The Google Settlement - From the Universal Library to the Universal Bookstore | Au Courant: The Google Settlement - From the Universal Library to the Universal Bookstore If you think about it, a universal bookstore is a pretty cool idea....
continue reading "Paul Courant's valuable account of what's at stake with the Google settlement" »
Madisonian I agree with comments that the “rights registry” aspect of the proposal is its most innovative and potentially problematic feature. There are serious antitrust questions to be asked and answered here, both as to the operation of what may...
continue reading "Michael Madison on GBS settlement" »
Scholarly Communications @ Duke: First, it is important to realize that this is a proposed agreement to settle a pending law suit. It must be approved by the court and may change in its details during that process. The plaintiff...
continue reading "Kevin Smith of Duke on the GBS settlement" »
Google Book Search Settlement: A Reader's Guide | Electronic Frontier Foundation Google Book Search Settlement: A Reader's Guide Legal Analysis by Fred von Lohmann As we reported earlier this week, Google has settled the lawsuit brought in 2005 by authors...
continue reading "Fred von Lohmann's brilliant and helpful analysis of the GBS settlement" »
Marcus Banks: Pros: * 20% free content in a book is much more meaningful than a few snippets. For authors, the chance for readers to get greater context will hopefully drive more sales. * Clarification of the roles of Google,...
continue reading "More helpful GBS settlement reaction" »
Google Book Search -- and Buy (ｩollectanea) ... And my own thoughts on and feelings about the deal are a combination of heartbreak, exhilaration, relief, pride, thankfulness, and gratitude to the libraries who worked so hard to make the deal...
continue reading "Georgia Harper is much more positive about the GBS settlement than I am" »
Chronicle.com: October 30, 2008 Harvard Says No Thanks to Google Deal for Scanning In-Copyright Works Harvard University has examined Google's recent legal settlement with publishers and authors, and found it wanting. The Harvard Crimson reported today that the university would...
continue reading "Harvard takes a stand vs. the Google Book Search settlement" »
Balkinization: Google Book Search Settlement Neil Netanel EDITED ON OCTOBER 29: Google has reached a settlement with the authors and publishers who sued it for copyright infringement over Google's Book Search Project. If the 141 page settlement agreement (not including...
continue reading "A very helpful reading of the Google/publishers' settlement from Neil Netanel" »
Last night I opened my mail to find my royalty statement for my 2004 book, The Anarchist in the Library. I was elated to find that Basic Books had sold the Korean rights to it. And I was tickled to...
continue reading "My initial take on the Google-publishers settlement" »
Chronicle.com: Settlement Near in Google Book Search Lawsuit? Rumors are swirling again that the long-running lawsuit between publishers and Google over its book-scanning program is on the verge of a settlement. According to a report in Library Journal, anonymous sources...
continue reading "Settlement near in Google Book Search case?" »
Chronicle.com: University Libraries in Google Project to Offer Backup Digital Library By JEFFREY R. YOUNG A group of major universities has been quietly working for the past two years to build one of the largest online collections of books ever...
continue reading "University Libraries in Google Project to Offer Backup Digital Library" »
New York Magazine: The End The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have...
continue reading "What's killing the book business?" »
Luis von Ahn, the Carnegie-Mellon professor who invented the Captcha system that helps identify you as a human instead of a spamming computer, has rolled out a system that uses words from newspapers and books that the Internet Archive and...
continue reading "Putting Captchas to good use: helping to search old books " »
Chronicle.com: Library of Congress: Laws Need Revision to Encourage Digital Preservation Countries should change their laws and policies to encourage digital preservation of copyrighted works, according to a report released today by the Library of Congress. It drafted the report...
continue reading "LoC report on law and digital preservation" »
Google Librarian Central: Endless summer Friday, July 11, 2008 9:28 AM Posted by Bethany Poole, Product Marketing Manager As you may have noticed, we've taken a somewhat leisurely summer break here at Librarian Central. We've been thinking about how to...
continue reading "Whoops! Google realizes it has been ignoring librarians." »
csmonitor.com: The field narrows for e-books As Microsoft backs away from digitizing old texts, some worry that a single company could privatize world knowledge. By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff Writer for The Christian Science Monitor / July 11, 2008...
continue reading "CS Monitor story on Google Book Search" »
YouTube - Google Book Search: UC Library Partnership...
continue reading "UC Librarians on Google Book Search" »
Library Stuff: How Google Used Librarians…and Got Away With It June 29th, 2008 I know when I’m being used. It’s a learned trait after being used many times by friends, family, and colleagues. Exactly one year ago today, the Google...
continue reading "How Google used librarians" »
Scan and Release: Digitizing the Boston Public Library | Everything is Miscellaneous ... Of this abundance, the digital group has so far scanned about 24,000 objects. When I point out to Maura Marx, the group’s head, that, given the library’s...
continue reading "David Weinberger on the digitization of the Boston Public Library Misc. collections" »
OStatic: Google Now Hosts Open Source Libraries Written by Reuven Lerner - May. 27, 2008 Ajax, a programming/design technique that combines JavaScript, asynchronous HTTP connections, XHTML, and CSS, has turned the Web into a true application platform. Before Ajax, submitting...
continue reading "What are the consequences of the Google Ajax API?" »
Wow. this is tremendously useful. Introduction This bibliography presents selected English-language articles and other works that are useful in understanding Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues...
continue reading "The Google Book Search Bibliography" »
Karen Coyle wants to know: OK, maybe I'm just in a particularly bad mood, but I guess I've just about had it with libraries shooting themselves in the foot. Then letting gangrene set in and going for amputation. I'm talking...
continue reading "Why aren't libraries sharing bibliographic data with everyone?" »
Chronicle.com: Nonprofit Library Group Will Share Book Records With Google In an effort to increase the visibility of librariesâ holdings on the Web, Google and OCLCâformerly known as the Online Computer Library Centerâhave agreed to swap data. Under the arrangement,...
continue reading "The OCLC-Google Book Search deal" »
The blog Digital Scholarship in the Humanities has an interesting essay on this subject: But how reliable are these electronic texts? Can researchers feel comfortable citing them and using them for text analysis? In my view, the quality of an...
continue reading "How reliable are electronic texts?" »
John Wilkin writes: Metasearch vs. Google Scholar What the world needs now is not another metasearch engine. Mind you, having more and better and even free metasearch engines is a good thing, but there are already many metasearch engines, each...
continue reading "Is there hope for Metasearch?" »
John Wilkin of the University of Michigan libraries was badly misquoted in an AP story on the digitization projects at the University of Michigan. On his blog, he uses that glitch (calling the Brewster Kahle's issues with Google "polemical," but...
continue reading "Between the "perfect" and the "good"?" »
This is pretty scholarly/geeky. But power Google users might find this interesting and funny. My colleague Bryan Pfaffenberger wrote: Dear colleagues: The following is an instructive, and I think hilarious, example of the need to proofread computer-generated bibliographies. I like...
continue reading "A funny thing happened while using Google Scholar ..." »
From if:book: Good news. Google has finally released an API (?) for Google Book Search: Web developers can use the Books Viewability API to quickly find out a book's viewability on Google Book Search and, in an automated fashion, embed...
continue reading "Google Books API finally released" »
Kembrew McLeod broke this story and has been organizing widespread protest to it. Here is the Chronicle of Higher Ed Story about it: U. of Iowa Writing Students Revolt Against a Plan They Say Would Give Away Their Work on...
continue reading "U of Iowa stealing student work and forcing Googlization" »
Editorial: Shape Shifters: Librarians Evolve Yet Again in the Age of Google: Editorial: Shape Shifters: Librarians Evolve Yet Again in the Age of Google Mariana Regalado Reference Librarian Brooklyn College Library Brooklyn NY 11210-2889 Jill Cirasella Reference Librarian Brooklyn College...
continue reading "Helpful Summary of resources on Google and Libraries" »
Check out Cory Doctorow's new article, "Put Not Your Faith In Ebook Readers."...
continue reading "Why E-Book Readers Fail" »
Chronicle.com: Google Plans to Expand Book-Scanning Partnerships Marissa Mayer, vice president for search products and user experience at Google, says the company will expand its Book Search project, which has scanned more than a million books in conjunction with several...
continue reading "Google claims preservation IS one of the goals of Google Book Search" »
YouTube - The Human Knowledge Project...
continue reading "The Human Knowledge Project, Part 1: My Henderson Lecture at UNC-Chapel Hill" »
Corrected: Ok. So maybe I don't hear things that well. Sorry....
continue reading "Big Google Books news on Wednesday?" »
Leslie Johnston explains: ... I do not know why so many people assume that this project is preserving the volumes -- Google does not say that; they say that they are creating access copies. The participant institutions know this, and...
continue reading "Google Book Search not about preservation " »
Google and Libraries Conference - March 10, 2008 « LACUNY Blog Register Now for Google and Libraries, on the METRO web site: Google and Libraries An International Conference Sponsored by ILIAC, The Harriman Institute and Columbia University Libraries, and METRO...
continue reading "Great conferece at Columbia U on March 10" »
On Wednesday afternoon I have a honor of delivering the Henderson Lecture at the UNC School of Information and Library Science. The subject of my talk will be: The Human Knowledge Project (Part 1): Four Conceptual Errors concerning Massive Digital...
continue reading "The Human Knowledge Project (Parts 1 and 2) at North Carolina and Duke" »
Chronicle.com: A Million Books Scanned at U. of Michigan -- and Counting Librarians at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor threw themselves a party on Friday to celebrate a milestone in their ambitious effort to scan every single book...
continue reading "One million Michigan books scanned so far" »
Eszter Hargittai on Crooked Timber: "What's in a Knol?": I address three issues concerning this new service of trying to create something Wikipedialike within Google’s domain: First, will it gain popularity? Second, what might we expect in terms of quality?...
continue reading "On Google's Challenge to Wikipedia" »
My neighbor and colleague Leslie Johnston writes: ... I have a slightly different spin and some different reasons, but I don't buy it either. I often take part in discussions about services for faculty and students, and sometimes hear ageist...
continue reading "More on the oversimplicity of "Digital Natives" etc." »
For a while I have been recoiling at all that talk about how young people today are "born digital" or are part of some special or distinct experiential universe that grants them special prowess or powers and blinds them to...
continue reading "The problem with "Digital natives," "Digital immigrants," and the "Digital generation" etc." »
Check out this hilarious scanning job Google did on The Gentleman's Magazine from 1855 for Book Search. Here is a frozen image:...
continue reading "That high-quality scanning job" »
Check out Google and Its Enemies by Jonathan V. Last. It does not break new ground. But it responds to Jonathan Band's arguments pretty well. It's a decent introduction to the copyright questions. Thanks to Cathy Davidson for the tip....
continue reading "The Weekly Standard (of all places) has a smart summary of the Google Books conflict" »
if:book: the NEA's misreading of reading: Matthew G. Kirschenbaum writes an elegant and concise critique of the National Endowment for the Arts' ominously titled new study of American reading trends, "To Read or Not to Read", which is a sequel...
continue reading "A brilliant critique of the NEA Reading report" »
Library Journal: Discussion of Google Scan Plan Heats Up on Blogs Now this is why we love the Blogosphere. In launching his blog, University of Michigan's (UM) dean of libraries Paul Courant recently offered a spirited defense of UM's somewhat...
continue reading "Library Journal summarizes the Courant-Vaidhyanathan conversation about Google Book Search" »
Ted Striphas knows more about the potential for and failures of electronic books than just about anyone. He is finishing up a book on the future of print right now. He wrote this about the Amazon Kindle: ...Though I may...
continue reading "Ted Striphas on the Kindle and the potential for decent Ebooks" »
Frank is one of my favorite legal scholars and bloggers. His new blog article, Conditions for the Digital Library of Alexandria, is essential reading: I have been in the middle of a major rethink of search engines’ efforts to digitize...
continue reading "Frank Pasquale on the Future of Digital Library projects" »
Steve Levy at Newsweek wrote this in-depth story about the new Amazon e-book reader: The Future of Reading Amazon's Jeff Bezos already built a better bookstore. Now he believes he can improve upon one of humankind's most divine creations: the...
continue reading "Amazon's new book reader destined to fail" »
Paul Courant has some insight into this question: Paul Duguid’s comment on an earlier post of mine gets to important issues that I expect to discuss repeatedly (although not repetitiously) in this space. Among the big questions that he raises...
continue reading "How well does Google learn from its mistakes?" »
Dan Cohen's Digital Humanities Blog has a nice summary of some of the rich commentary this week about Google and Google Book Search. In the post, he writes: (Picky criticism to go along with the praise for Siva: if one...
continue reading "Why is the Web different?" »
As a comment to Ryan Shaw's post, "Libraries Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth," a bright guy named Patrick elaborates on what could be done with the right image formats: Patrick wrote: October 22nd, 2007 at 1:21 pm I...
continue reading "Drilling down into the Google Book Search image problem" »
Ryan Shaw left a great comment below under the item about University of Michigan's Paul Courant's defense of Michigan's partnership with Google. Here is the text of his post about the image formats that Google is delivering to libraries and...
continue reading "Ryan Shaw explains the "image problem" with Google Book Search" »
Economist Paul Courant was the provost of the University of Michigan when it decided to be the first and boldest partner of Google for the library scanning project that has become part of Google Book Search. Paul recently became the...
continue reading "Paul Courant of Michigan Addresses Google Book Search Criticism" »
Tony Grafton is a brilliant historian of the book who often writes for magazines. I could not do my work without modeling it on his. This week in The New Yorker Tony issues his views on Google, mass digitization projects,...
continue reading "Grafton's brilliant invervention to the digital library debate" »
Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web - New York Times October 22, 2007 Libraries Shun Deals to Place Books on Web By KATIE HAFNER Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their...
continue reading "The luster is coming off Google Book Search" »
Library of Congress Advances 2 Digital Projects Abroad - New York Times: October 18, 2007 Library of Congress Advances 2 Digital Projects Abroad By DOREEN CARVAJAL PARIS, Oct. 17 — The Library of Congress announced an ambitious plan on Wednesday...
continue reading "World Digital Library: Inching toward the "Human Genome Project of the Mind?"" »
I have been saying for years now that Google is the wrong agent to produce and maintain the "universal library." My great hope was that all the major universities of the world would unite, raise the money, and host such...
continue reading "The Open Library: A Very Important Step" »
From Chronicle.com: Google's Own Second Life? Today The Arizona Republic notes an interesting rumor: Google is reportedly working to create a virtual world that will rival Second Life, and the company may be testing the project at Arizona State University....
continue reading "Rumor: Google partners with U of Arizona to create a new virtual platform like Second Life" »
Topic Archive
Is Google a Library?
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to The Googlization of Everything in the Is Google a Library? category, listed from newest to oldest.
Search
Other Topics
Like the Mind of God (57 posts)
All the World's Information (75 posts)
What If Big Ads Don't Work (20 posts)
Don't Be Evil (16 posts)
Is Google a Library? (85 posts)
Challenging Big Media (46 posts)
The Dossier (49 posts)
Global Google (26 posts)
Google Earth (6 posts)
A Public Utility? (37 posts)
About this Book (28 posts)
Archive
- November 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- May 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
Other books by Siva:
Links
RSS Feed
Siva Vaidhyanathan.
A project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
Site design by Holladay Penick