I know it raises familiar awkward questions about Google’s market power but in this instance I have to agree. Google’s ban on advertising for essay writing services joins its existing bans on ads for “weapons, prostitution, drugs, tobacco, fake documents and miracle cures.”

I thought I had written my own robust defence of Google Book Search and book digitisation in general but it seems I haven’t - at least I haven’t found any on this blog or my personal one (though I posted enthusastically about meeting Brewster Kahle who runs the Internet Archive and briefly mentioned my own experience of using Google Books).

Kevin Kelly has had a go at providing a popular account of the potential importance and utility of the widespread availability of books online in Scan This Book! in the New York Times. He rehearses many of the good arguments against the ever-lengthening text copyright regime and for the social utility of book scanning programmes but unfortunately his argument is somewhat spoiled by his need to “epater les bourgeois”.

First by hyperbolic statements: “The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years.” Inventions? Talmudic scholars (for one) would be surprised to learn we had just invented annotation.

Secondly, and more importantly, by un-necessarily sweeping and apocalyptic predictions about the way technology will (must?) change existing businesses (like publishing).

Copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won’t mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media and sewn together into the universal library.

Much of what he says is arguably valid for non-fiction and particularly scientific research but less so for fiction where (as Updike says) we actually seem to like reading (or viewing) self-contained narratives (though we may then go on to comment on them or construct other self-contained narratives based on them).
He usefully points out that academic science is heading faster than other fields towards the universal library but doesn’t think through the implications. Academics need to publish freely to advance and do so happily but only because there is a state system in place that pays them to be experts because society benefits from their creation and dissemination of knowledge. It is hard to imagine the same model being applied to the writers of cookbooks, say, but in the UK we pay authors a (very) modest sum when their books are checked out of the public library.

Could some form of super-UNESCO (or a number of national government initiatives) help to fund freely-available fiction (or other creative works) to be added to the universal Internet library of the future? Perhaps paid for through a levy on broadband subscriptions as suggested by some in France - the Global License? This is approximately the way the BBC works, for example (though it is not as free as it should be in sharing the content that our license fees have paid for). Surely this is a more attractive proposition for artists than having to individually flog “performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, ads, sponsorship or periodic subscriptions” which KK suggests are the options that will be available to artists in the brave new world when their individual works themselves are no longer saleable.

KK anticipates some of the hostile reaction that followed from John Updike (speaking predominantly on behalf of fiction authors) and by Nicholas Carr (among others) more generally:

Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what’s taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

I for one am in the young enthusiast camp but I don’t think it means that the way things work in the creative industries has to be swept away in order to bring the (near)-universal Internet library about.

If we could reduce the term of copyright to 14 years, renewable for another 14 (as Creative Commons suggests) and if copyright could be easily asserted at a central database but the default for works where the ownership was unclear was that such work would be in the public domain, authors would still be able to get paid for their works during their most valuable commercial life but we would have a huge public domain of useful information instead of the stunted one we have now.

The above suggestions still radical (more radical than many authors and publishers would like, I am sure) but are consistent with the new potentials technology offers without requiring the total restructuring of publishing…

I’ve not provided as fully thought-through or well-ordered set of arguments here as I’d like (and not perhaps a particularly original point of view either - it draws heavily on Lawrence Lessig’s thinking, for example) but there’s as much polishing here as I can spare considering the £0 I am getting paid to write this! What do you think?

Update: As if in answer to my wishes, I have just heard about a very promising bill in the US House of Representatives - the Orphan Works Act which would release into the public domain works where the owner is no longer known. Someone should set up a campaign to support Lamar Smith (the bill’s sponsor).

David Brake

The US Department of Justice asked Google recently for a selection of the searches people made over a two month period, with the identities of the searchers removed. Google, to its credit, has resisted this while the other major US search engines have not. John Battelle and Danny Sullivan have further analysis of this issue.

There are four issues that arise from this which have not been prominently dealt with in discussions I’ve read:

1) If Google hadn’t resisted this request, would we have heard about the fact that AOL, Yahoo and MSN immediately complied?
2) How many people realise that Google (and others) frequently do keep track not just of what people search for but who searches for what?
3) Mightn’t there be some searches that tend to reveal the identity of the searcher even if the searcher’s IP address is concealed? Particularly if you examine them in time order? Update: Search Engine Watch just produced a lengthy analysis of this issue which suggests that this is probably not a big issue.
4) The DOJ doesn’t seem to have asked only for searches by Americans. Does it have any business looking at searches from international users who might (for whatever reason) have chosen to use yahoo.com instead of (for example) yahoo.co.uk?

Update: Tim Wu of Columbia Law School writes an excellent analysis of the whole issue on Slate, arguing that it’s simply excessive for search engines to collect these reams of personal data on what people are searching for.

A very interesting article has been produced outlining the privacy implications of Internet search engines. It isn’t just that they make it easy for others to get at publicly-held data - they also collect all sorts of data about your surfing habits and other information. Google and others say they don’t use such data or intend to use it in any way except to make your surfing easier, but will this always be true? And do people always realise the implications of their trading their privacy for convenience?

I have to say I use all of Google’s potentially privacy-intrusive functions, but I am addicted to new cool features…

P.S. I agree with Ray Everett-Mills who expresses surprise that a company like Google has no privacy officer. As far as I can tell they leave that stuff to the lawyers - lawyers can protect you from the consequences of mistakes but a good privacy officer would keep them from making mistakes. Here in Europe I like to think a company like Google would not think twice about having one…

The UK government is trying out a new service - the People’s Network Enquiry Service where you can ask (it seems) just about any question you like and a librarian either from the UK or somewhere else in the world (if you mail outside 9-5 Mon to Fri) will try to answer it. Will this encourage those not online to use it by providing an easy to understand alternative to surfing? Time will tell…

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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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