Many librarians (and academics) are accustomed to being somewhat snobbish about the Internet and often rightly so. Historically it has been great at providing stuff dealing with current events and issues but it has tended to have a lousy “memory”. If you want to know what people wrote and thought prior to 1998 or so, you normally need to consult a library.
This is now starting to change. In 2003 there was a flurry of announcements from Amazon, Google and others about making the full text of books available online and searchable. I confess I assumed most of this would be out of copyright not very useful texts but Google Print just (covertly) made it possible to search just the books they have scanned in (thanks Google Blog!) and a search for major theorists like my old friend Bourdieu shows a lot of good, ‘major league’ academic books are now there. I also stumbled across some entertaining recreational reading…

It’s harder to tell what Amazon has got as it mixes search by author and title etc with keyword search using the same form. Note - this only works if you search via Amazon.com (the US site) - it isn’t available through Amazon UK yet.

Of course even if you find a book you want to read via Google Print you have to read it on screen or print it out one page at a time. Amazon only lets you read a few pages from any one book as a taster.

P.S. If the book you want isn’t available in full text, a Yahoo or Google search for a book title may tell you which university or public libraries it is available at.

Update: I didn’t realise that Google like Amazon will only let you see a few pages at a time from any of the books you find if that book is still in copyright.

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Joe Krauss, who co-founded Excite, reveals that although the top 10 searches on Excite were made much more often than any other searches, they only represented 3% of the total searches made that day. In other words - power laws notwithstanding - most searches are the only search made with that term or set of terms on that day. There really is a huge variety in what people look for online.

Of course what isn’t clear is how much diversity there would be if you clustered searches by theme (eg what proportion of all searches are about sex in some form or another). For more about how the Internet makes it possible to address the diverse interests of people as well as their “mass” interests, see this blog post I made earlier.

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Krishna Bharat, chief scientist for Google News, told Wired recently,
“The truth is, Google News doesn’t have a point of view. It’s a computer, and computers do not understand these topics the way humans do and can’t be systematically biased in any direction.”

Well it seems the search engine companies have the public on their side on this one - 68% of US users say that search engines are a fair and unbiased source of information according to a recent Pew report on search engine users but if you sit back and think for a second it is hard to see how Google News could be ‘objective’ - what does that even mean? As soon as Google steps in and dictates what counts as a news source and what doesn’t that could arguably introduce bias - and every algorithm has its own tacit ‘tendencies’ to favour certain results over other results whether to improve “relevance” or just accidentally.

It’s a little worrying that most search engine users don’t really grasp these issues. I tried to interview a few of them a couple of years ago about this and found it hard even to get them to understand what I was trying to ask them about…

Thanks to John Battelle’s Searchblog for the link (there are plenty of comments on this issue there).

Salon’s set of satirical tech/politics predictions for 2005 includes this:

Just weeks after announcing ambitious plans to digitize millions of books from five major libraries, Google burns down its electronic Alexandria before even really starting it.

The problem isn’t the anticipated copyright headaches. It’s the readers — or lack thereof.

“When news of our plans broke, we were flooded with e-mails from college students begging us to make more term papers available, not books,” says a Google executive who asked not to be named. “The kids told us that they have plenty of access to books on paper that they don’t read. What they really need is someone to do the reading, thinking and writing for them.”

Convinced that absolutely no one wants to read most of the tomes they’d just begun digitizing, Google decides to divert the tens of millions designated for the book project into hiring underemployed Ph.D.’s to build up the world’s biggest virtual term-paper library.

I certainly hope it’s scholarship and not laziness that prompts people to request copies of my MSc dissertation and other academic writing…

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How about the BBC challenging Google for the provision of online services?

“We
have got the best content in the world and a more flexible rights
framework than anyone,” says [Ashley] Highfield. “We have the best
brand, I would argue, online in the world in terms of trust and
impartiality. We’ve also got access to some of the best technology in
the world. If you glue all of that together we should be in a prime
position to create the best next-generation search navigation tool in
the world,” he enthuses.

I was wondering whether this would include a challenge to the real core of Google’s power, the ubiquitous search engine.

Come to think of it, I generally go google, and then iBBC if no luck on the first few screens.

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Although ‘top line’ figures about how much money search engine companies make are easy to come by, it is harder to find detailed information about how that pie is divided. Majestic Research has just released some intriguing figures about Google’s income. Notably:

• On average, Google gets nearly a dime for every search it serves in the US.
• 98 percent of the company’s revenues are from paid search. 65% of revs are domestic (US)
• nearly 17% of all searches end up with a click on a paid link.

What do you make of that, EVC? I didn’t realise how dominant US revenues were for global Internet players like Google, and I didn’t realise how effective those paid links appear to be (though of course there are several different kinds of paid links and this excerpt doesn’t make clear what kind is being referred to here).

Thanks to John Battelle’s Searchblog for the info.

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If you believe as I do that broadband Internet access is qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from dialup access (see this Pew report and this ethnographic report in the UK from iSociety for some examples) then this recent global suvey of broadband access gives pause for thought.

Of the 128m broadband users worldwide, 53m are Asian, 42m are in the Americas and 32.8m are in Europe. While user growth in Asia is a little slower than elsewhere it is still well ahead and it will be interesting to see what difference this makes to the domestication of Internet in those countries. Sadly Africa seems as ‘digitally divided’ as ever, no matter how you look at it. The report lumps the Middle East and Africa together with ‘nearly 1m’ subscribers. And I’d be prepared to bet most of them are either white South Africans or wealthy Arabs and Israelis.

As to Europe, to my surprise, France (which has historically lagged behind in overall Internet penetration - see ITU) has the largest number of broadband subscribers in Europe - 5.27m (though Germany has 5.26m and the UK has 5m). Broadband prices in Europe have apparently dropped by 23% since the beginning of 2004. I hope this year brings continuing falls to the point where it no longer makes financial sense for Internet users to stick to dial-up…

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Slashdot | Search Engines for Handwritten Documents

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