Home » Posts tagged 'Google' (Page 3)
Tag Archives: Google
(Update) Official: Google Shuts Down Uncle Sam and GovSearch.Google.com
A quick update to a post from Monday that mentioned Google's specialty search tools (including Uncle Sam and GovSearch.Google.com) were offline. It's now official both of these sites as well as four other specialty search tools that Google offered for at least a decade are NO LONGER AVAILABLE. Search Engine Land has posted a brief article* (written by your truly) with info and a couple of quotes from Google about the end of the services. The article is linked to from INFOdocket or you can go to the article directly. Continue reading
Disappeared: Google’s U.S. Government Search Sites and Other Special Search Interfaces Gone
Greetings. On our INFOdocket site we've posted about what appears to be either a glitch (that has gone one since at least last Thursday), the elimination of, or something else because Google's Uncle Sam and USgov.Google.com government search tool now takes users to the Google homepage. You can find the post here. Two final points: 1. We have sent an email to Google a few hours ago asking for a comment. If/when we do hear back from them I'll update this post. 2. In our INFOdocket post we point out that Google is free to do as they see fit just as users are free to go elsewhere or come up with new search tactics. However, we would hope that Google would at least let users know before or as they make changes to their web search products and services. Continue reading
More on Google and Newspaper Archives
Following up on Google cancelling its newspaper digitization project, here are two more stories:
- Google archive decision 'astonishing' to Ottawa originator, by Vito Pilieci, The Ottawa Citizen (May 24, 2011). Google’s decision to end support for its newspaper archival services is distressing news for the Ottawa businessman who sold Google the technology to digitize records. "It’s disappointing, especially when you consider what I thought that this would do," said Bob Huggins, former chief executive officer and co-founder of PaperOfRecord.com, which Google bought in 2008 for an undisclosed sum. ...Huggins suggested that Google should partner with public sector institutions, such as the Library of Congress in the United States, to continue the newspaper digitization effort. The information could be stored by the library for safekeeping and made available online for everyone to read. "They need to give their head a shake here and realize they have some public responsibility," added Huggins. "For a company that said they wanted to organize all of the world’s data, what happened to that mandate?" While Google has shifted its focus away from digitizing historical newspapers, the company is trying to work hand-in-hand with newspapers to help them charge for content on their websites.
- Demise of Google Newspaper Archive Shows Need for National Digital Library Policy, by Irvin Muchnick, Beyond Chron, The San Francisco Alternative Daily (May 25, 2011). ...the collapse of the project reinforces the limits of self-appointed public utilities. Apparently, the newspaper archive wasn't getting enough eyeballs to make the project profitable.
Google and Newspaper Archives
On a tangent: Google is cancelling its newspaper digitization project:
- Google abandons master-plan to archive the world's newspapers, by Carly Carioli, The Boston Phoenix (May 19 2011). Google told partners in its News Archive project that it would cease accepting, scanning, and indexing microfilm and other archival material from newspapers, and was instead focusing its energies on "newer projects that help the industry, such as Google One Pass, a platform that enables publishers to sell content and subscriptions directly from their own sites." ...In an email, Google said it would continue to support the existing archives it has scanned and indexed. It added, "We do not, however, plan to introduce any further features or functionality to the digitized news product."
It remains to be seen whether Google will complete the process of indexing the newspapers it has scanned. We'd guess not.But wait, there's more:
...The deal Google struck with partner newspapers stipulated that, somewhere down the line, a paper could purchase Google's digital scans of its content for a fee. That fee is now being waived, and Google is not only giving publishers free access to the scanned files, but also the rights to publish them with other partners. In essence, Google just scanned a huge chunk of the newspaper industry's valuable long-tail content, and then handed it to the publishers.... Are any of us is in a position to exploit those resources without Google's help?I wonder if any libraries or library consortium is willing to strike a deal with the publishers and put those scans online? BTW, this is evidently completely separate from the Google purchase of PaperOfRecord, which, after going offline after the Google purchase, is now, apparently, back online:
- Disappearance of Paper of Record Database.
- Help forum > Google News > Google News Suggestions > Paper of Record.
- The historical newspaper database Paper of Record is now back online.
- paperofrecord.com
Siva Vaidhyanathan on Google
Siva Vaidhyanathan addresses how our assumptions and beliefs are limiting our choices and hurting us.
- Can Google Do No Evil?, By Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Chronicle of Higher Education, "The Chronicle Review" (May 1, 2011). [subscription required] The problem is that we have been fooled. The very idea that a company can actually pledge something like "Don't be evil," and that we believe it, has done us great harm.
At the 2009 Aspen Ideas Festival, the radio journalist Brian Lehrer asked Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, about the potential for regulation: "Is there ever a point at which Google becomes so big that it's kind of scary and needs to be regulated as a public utility?" The meeting room filled with laughter before Schmidt could respond. So Lehrer, a knowledgeable and experienced interviewer, continued: "Seriously, literally, is there a point where you need to be regulated as a public utility?" "Would you prefer to have the government running innovative companies, or would you rather have the private sector running them?" Schmidt responded. "But Eric," Lehrer interjected, "I would expect a more sophisticated answer from you. As we saw with the banks, it's not a question of Soviet-style communism or free-market capitalism. Banks needed smart regulation." Not so for Internet companies, Schmidt insisted. Google had been--and would always be--"based on a set of values and principles."As Siva points out no market, firm, or technology, is truly "unregulated." And the mission of Google is not to do good, but to make money. And we (libraries in particular) "have outsourced so much of our daily decision making to a single company that we can't comfortably challenge its role in our lives." It would be a lot easier for more people to understand Lehrer's question and Siva's analysis if libraries were providing better community-based views of digital information through building digital collections and robust indexing tools. In the absence of public alternatives that select, organize, and preserve digital information, most users accept commercial indexes of the "whole" internet as not just "good enough" but the only imaginable possibility. Siva calls this "Public Failure." He says this occurs when the public sector has been intentionally dismantled, degraded, or underfinanced. The result? "The public institutions that were supposed to provide ... services were prevented from doing so. Private actors [fill] the vacuum, often failing spectacularly and costing the public more than the institutions they displaced." If libraries fail to provide community-based, public alternatives soon, that laughter that greeted Lehrer's question will soon turn into ironic regret as our choices are increasingly limited, our fees raised, and our privacy compromised by commercial interests that may think they are "doing no evil," but that succeed only in doing commercial good and fail to even try to do any public good. The whole article is well worth reading. Continue reading
Latest Comments