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+ Tue, December 14

Your Library, Google

In case you were still unsure, the revolution won’t be televised.  It’ll be Googlized.  As if 8 billion webpages aren’t enough, they announced today that they’ll be digitizing and indexing the full contents of some of the world’s largest libraries.

The news broke for me by the Michigan Daily headline from the newspaper stack atop the drop-off box in Michigan’s Graduate Library lobby.  Fitting, I guess.  Walking through the stacks on my way to class after that, you go through countless rows, stretching away on your sides farther than you can see.  Floor to ceiling, leather-bound books with fading text.  To think that these 7 million books with who knows how many billions of pages are all going to be available in the public domain, for free forever – there’s a certain beauty in that.

I read it when it came out and you can still read an older opinion on Google’s role as the digitized deity of this day at CNN. It’s an interesting point, made all the more strong with Google SMS, this effort to digitize such a weighty chunk of our academic knowledge, the white pages, the maps, the calculator, the whole weight of their 8,000,000,000 page index.

If there was one company I’d want orchestrating this massive collection of our history and knowledge, it’d be the good guys of Google.

1 person has chimed in.
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1 → debashis  –  (Dec 14 2004,  4:11 PM)

Awesome… So now I can completely do all my research for papers on the internet, instead of this whole, must have atleast four sources from books shit…I love google..It brings me Tara Reid’s boobies and it will soon bring me my school work.






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