Google to provide hard-to-find information

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Wednesday, 30 November 2005

The Search Engine Google has been developing ways to expand the amount of information that could be linked to its search engine. Google Inc. donated US$3 million to the U.S. Library of Congress to back up the World Digital Library. The donation is to help set up a system for providing digital reproduction of rare documents from around the world. The World Digital Library program was designed after the American Memory project, which was launched eleven years ago by the Library of Congress. Supported by US$48 million private donations and US$15 million from the federal government, the American Memory project has more than 10 million documents in its database including photos and letters from the Civil War and early maps of the United States. James Billington, the librarian of Congress, is hoping to create a similar site devoted to other nations outside U.S. and Europe. Materials from India, Islam and China will be one of the World Digital Library’s large sections. According to Billington, majority of the documents gathered would be unique since users won’t be able to find it anywhere else. Billington stated that publicly displaying these rare documents out in the internet is important to preserve materials which might have been destroyed in other hands. Sergey Brin, a Google co-founder, stated that the project is a humanitarian initiative for the company. He added that their main goal is to make information available to the public. However, critics believe that the project is not entirely philanthropic. Since Google earns money from the ads that appear on their page when Internet users use their search engine, the company profits from more available material added online. On the other hand, it is doubtful that Google or other search engines would link all the documents included in the World Digital Library because their tools used to crawl up the web pages still cannot recognize specific documents such as handwritten letters. “Google will eventually figure out a way to index almost every document in the World Digital Library,” Brin stated. The World Digital Library is being challenged by major publishers and authors in court to prevent Google from reproducing the copyrighted texts without permission. By Paulene Calinawan Jump2Top.Com Search Engine Optimization Company

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